The 61st Hunger Games: The Reckoning
by chthonic python
Summary: These Games won't go easy on either side of the screen. To keep their tributes alive and navigate the brewing sea of treachery in the corners and ballrooms of the Capitol, the mentors will need to dig deep into every resource they've worked for, and most importantly, trust nobody. Submit Your Own Mentor [Closed].
1. Boots

Sascha hawks a mouthful of blood and splatters the baseboard. It's a good shot. Though plenty of it just drips down into his eyes. His nose and throat burn like blue billy. He shakes his head to get his face clear, sweat-spikes of overgrown hair itching his ears, and licks the salt off his top lip. The shaking is setting off a fantastic bass-boosted migraine, so he's got that going for him too.

"I could really use-"

Something explodes whitely into his nose again. He swings out, spinning like a drunken pendulum as he coughs and blinks. His hair scrapes the floor. All he can see from down here is a pair of boots. Either his depth perception is shot or they're backing up again.

"-could use a na-"

This time the shoulder. Which is somehow the worst place yet. The muscle seizes up, and his wrist jerks involuntarily against the belted ziptie. The boots are powdered, for that aiming trick- they used to pull the same thing with the canings back in school- and the next impact digs into the same muscle, right before Sascha is finished sucking for breath. It comes out in a bloody whoop. His diaphragm is spasming. He jerks on the end of the cord like a half-split pinata, spinning one way, then unwinding the other. He is starting to hiccup.

"Napkin," he drools lazily, chasing something gritty with his tongue. He can't feel his lips, but the lumps on them seem to be impeding his diction. "_Hck. _Not to put you to any troub...trouble...there's just some tooth in my...eye."

The boots ask him the same question they have asked forty-three times. Sascha kindly offers them the same suggestion he has given forty-three times, spicing it up with an amendment about the circumference of a couple of key organs, and the effect that testosterone is alleged to have on them when abused.

The next one balloons his ear like a cauliflower. The next one fractures a floating rib. Sascha gasps quietly on acidic spitup. The next one cracks into his left kneecap. The boots are in top form tonight. As he drools and dangles, deadweight, he hiccups warm tears that run down his forehead and mix with the gunk on the floor.

The boots ask him the forty-fourth time for the identities of the rest of the rebel mentors. Sascha sucks on the hole of his expelled upper right cuspid. And nothing is coming to him this time.

He hopes the plan goes through soon enough. He doesn't know if he's going to hold out much longer. He's been around the block more than he's deserved, that's certain. He's counting every hour he buys them as laurels on his life. They should remember him for this. Right? They'll remember this. Old Eight can put up a plaque or something. Hell, maybe even a statue. One with a damn hefty organ.

Snow gave him a crown for stepping out of the arena two decades back, but he's paying for this one in teeth instead of teens and children. That's better. That's a better deal. He pops out a loose molar with a sticky sound, lets it tinkle on the floor, and smiles red and gappy.

"Eat my dick," he suggests.

After a baton shatters his ankle into five discrete pieces, Sascha starts to scream.

The 61st Hunger Games: The Reckoning.

**(Hey, FF! I had an idea and wanted to see where I could go with it. Submit your own mentor through PM- the form's on my profile. A mentor's goal: not only to get your tribute out alive, but to navigate the cutthroat, brewing nest of treachery within the Capitol, whether that's on the loyalist side, the rebels, or undecided between them...but that won't last long in a field like this. I hope you'll enjoy.)**


	2. District Eight: Donuts

_Eight days earlier (Reaping Day)._

* * *

KerriAnne Terwilliger laughs like a gunshot, and when she's on the whiskey it turns into a firefight. Like her or not- and everyone figures that for themselves very quickly- she's got a presence you can't escape in a room. Plenty have tried.

"Sit and spin. Dacker's not on the table. That wet fruit hasn't pulled a tribute in all twenty years. _Who's_ featuring him?"

"Dynamo Solutions, the big holo reality guys. They do underdogs, Mama. Appeals to the kids."

"What do they want with those? Kids are bastards. You were the lippiest one. I should've drowned you in a bucket years ago."

"That hurts, Mama. That's really hurtful." Sascha grins and generously tops off his brandy. It's vanilla, and Capitol, and a little bit shit. But the train's going to have a better selection than the automobile. They've only just gotten started.

KerriAnne winds down her headrest and cranes around to the teenagers huddled in the back seat.

"You," she levers at the girl. Points with second and middle finger around her glass. "You're seventeen-"

"Next week," she mumbles, twisting her lace hem ragged.

"-and you're too old to be having a cry, missy. You look like hell. I got my babies to shut up and ask respectful before they were four." The older woman flicks something damp and white at her. At least the girl catches it. Passable reflexes. "Clean that up. I want you happy and sparkly before the Capitol gets a look at you. There's always cameras. The moment you got up on that stage, your privacy was gone. I don't expect you to _glow_, but you look like ninety-to-one odds. Let's aim for a sixty."

"You, little guy?" Sascha crinkles his eyes. The boy shrinks into the back of the seat, wiping his nose with his sleeve. "Drink up. Calm down. The bar's wide open."

He offers his glass, and the boy shifts it between both hands, as if not sure what to do with it.

Two-year escort Margarie Tanicus clears her throat, adjusting her clementine pearls. She glances to their Peacekeeper chauffeur for backup, but he's busy actually doing his job in here. "With an older tribute there would perhaps be call for a legal exception, but I don't think-"

"Margie. Margie, look at me. Look at us. Have you seen Mama Hangman, first Victor of Eight?" Sascha tugs KerriAnne's broad face down next to his own. "Would we make bad decisions for our tributes? Look at these faces. We know what we're doing."

The boy sniffs it, sips on the brandy, and coughs hard enough to make his eyes bug.

Sascha cracks up behind his hand. "He's fine. He's fine. Put some hair on his chest. Anyone got another of those?"

KerriAnne pours him another glass, and the mentor toasts his mentor. They smile broadly at each other. Waiting for a crack.

Something's going to happen this year. KerriAnne didn't raise this slick bastard out of a bloatfly-choked swamp, slap him presentable and Capitol-gracious on his Tour and every other live appearance, temper his nightmares for years and his furious embers for two decades, without having the wits to sense something under his skin. What do they say in Ten? If it looks like a patty, smells like a patty, and feels like a patty when your foot sticks in…

It's probably a bullshit patty.

* * *

It was chilled, unrestful gray, but at least it wasn't raining. Rain in Eight usually comes with a flavor of the month- acid, smog, unseasonal sleet. Margarie had looked put out that she didn't get to unveil her luminol umbrella. Lined up and whispering with Chenil on stage, Sascha had looked preoccupied himself.

KerriAnne knows her kids. Games-born better than biological, by reason. She had smelled something. She was starting to sight it out too.

There was time to shuffle closer while the mayor was still expostulating over their shivering tributes. She joined them shoulder-first, bumping solidly into Sascha. "We making bets already, ladies?"

"Margie's new hair, Mum. We're both thinking of matching," Sascha whispered brightly.

"It won't be the boy." Chenil shrugged with gentle regret, squeezing Sascha's hand once. "He'll be luckiest if he goes down in the bloodbath."

"I know, I know. I'll feed him up. Give him a good week." His face twisted.

"That's all?" KerriAnne nudged.

"And a wad of lint." The ceremonies were winding up. Chenil would get to head home for the year. Not so much for the Hangman's Daughter and the peanut gallery.

"All right then." KerriAnne drummed on her gut. "Pray to Snow they'll have a minibar this time."

She was smelling bull, and something was getting sticky. Chenil wasn't one to weep over a thirteen year old, after the two of them she'd lanced on the same branch. And KerriAnne would wager Sascha had never held a girl's hand on purpose since his mother took him to grade school, and never with that micro-twitch of concentration. He waited a good, long time before he put his hand in his pocket, but she would bet both tributes that it didn't go in empty.

* * *

"Welcome. Welcome. Bedrooms are in the forward car. Food is everywhere. Attendants are here and there, if you need anything. I can't speak for KerriAnne, but don't expect me to scrub your hair." Sascha makes a circle with his arms out, finishing with a yawn and slump into an armchair. The children are clinging even closer with their mutual culture shock. It's cute. They haven't figured out they're not going to stay buddies yet.

Ancia, sixteen, wrists thin as baby bamboo stalks. And Loomer, thirteen, red-cheeked with unfamiliar alcohol. Every damned working kid is a Loomer. There've been two others Reaped that KerriAnne can remember. Mothers with no class.

"Go on." She prods the girl in the back. "Try something chocolate. I'm sure you've never gotten your hands on that before."

Ancia makes a stiff step forward like a nutcracker. She reaches for a glass covering case over a pyramid of cupcakes, and pulls a mint one out. Breaks it in half.

KerriAnne coughs sharply.

Loomer pulls his hand back before he can receive it, balling it up behind his back.

"Bang." She smacks her fist into her palm. They both jump. "You died. You came up, offered him your own food. Didn't guard your stance. Didn't make sure he's unarmed." She moves to them and taps on Ancia's throat, stomach, exposed wrist. "It'd take him a lot of stabs to kill you fast. No muscle. But if his knife's contaminated, or if you can't figure out how to wrap your wounds, or he hits _one _lucky artery, you just signed your papers. Show me how you'd do it better."

Ancia presses her lips together. She holds out the cupcake again with a shift in stance, knees bent and shoulders tight. She glances to KerriAnne for confirmation. She gets a smack in the side of the head.

"You looked away from him. You died. Eyes on the fucking objective, girl."

Ancia forces a shaky exhale and starts again. Slowly, Loomer reaches out for the treat. Ancia reels it back in by a few centimeters, and Loomer freezes. She grabs him by the collar and pushes him away, lifting her knee for a soft bump to his chin.

"What was that supposed to be? Do it harder. His chest, if you're worried about the teeth."

Loomer still looks terrified. Sascha rolls off the armchair with half a bagel in his mouth. "All right, hold on." He chews and swallows thickly. "Loomer's turn. You're a smart boy, and you're hungry. You've found this bigger girl. Subjectively speaking. She's got supplies, but you're the one with a knife."

"How would I get one of those?" His curly head sags low. "I'm just gonna run from the Cornucopia. And nobody'll want to sponsor me."

Sascha has already fielded a series of apologetic brand-loyal sponsor calls, and he knows for a fact this is true. But he ruffles Loomer's hair. "You make your own. Whittle a branch. Sharpen a rock. KerriAnne made one out of tape."

"Got a better couple of little helpers now." She pats the sheaths on her hips. "But you don't need steel. You can stick a lot of hard things into a soft place."

"And that's where you're aiming." Sascha presses a jelly donut into Loomer's hand. "Your reach isn't great, so I wouldn't suggest you aim for the eyes. As she holds out the food, lunge and sink this into her neck as many times as you can. Knock her arms down with your free one."

Ancia's cupcake extends like an olive branch. Loomer plunges his donut knife into her neck, and she jerks suddenly at the warm stickiness. Full of hyperfocused energy, he plunges it again, impacting her chin, shoulders, and breastbone. Flecks fly. It turns to mush in his hand. He's batting down her arms and stepping in the farther she backs off until Sascha calls a stop.

Jam drips pinkly down Ancia's dress. She's squeezed her own cupcake into green paste. Loomer is crying, lips peeled back into a heaving grimace.

"Good," KerriAnne says. She snaps her fingers. "New donuts. Again."

* * *

He unfolds it when he's over the commode, reaching discreetly into an adjacent pocket. If they've got cameras, and he doesn't doubt it, he can hope they have the taste to not peer too close. Although this is the Capitol we're talking about.

_13 is a go._

He crinkles the slip into a ball, tosses it in, and drains it away.

"_Fuck_," he mutters, shaking off. And pretends, for the camera crew, that he's gotten an organ or two caught in his zipper.

* * *

**(Thank you so much to my submitters and readers so far. There are still plenty of spots open!)**


	3. District One: Commencement

_One week before Reaping Day._

* * *

The Chairman of Commerce has never conversated directly with any region above Satin's neckline, but that's hardly a problem. She wouldn't be conversating with him without the Commerce.

Warm chestnut hair flows all the way to her ass, and her dress doesn't go much farther. The stylists did her nails in long, lucent silver. They always want to remind people about the daggers. Dangerous. Not dangerous enough to keep them away. Her scent and her voice are crystallized honey and they beg to choke on her. Some of them inordinately.

"I have got to _go_, Decius- I _wish_ I could stay. My train is coming. Decius, stop that. You're appalling." She giggles and tugs at his hand, loosing him from her arm. She knows how to break every finger in one motion. She knows how she could angle it to any of the station's security cameras overhead. But she's perfectly gentle. She only made a mistake in her first year out.

"The train's not going to leave without you," he's chuckling. Another squeeze. Finally, a huff of surrender, and he steps back, hands raised. His bone-white cowlick settles like snow on a tomato complexion. The air conditioning is wobbling the peak of it. "Ah, well. I can't keep a Victor from her appointments. You tell me you'll have space for lunch before game day."

"One lunch. One." She crosses her heart. A tiny pout accentuates the second heart of her mouth. "You're buying, Dec. I have got to save for my tribute. You don't know how much this dress put me down."

"All eight inches of it? You're outpacing that allowance, kitten."

"Please, Mr. Fring, my _tribute_."

"You're a whiner, you know that? You're a little whiner." He's still laughing. The cowlick twitches. Satin Chanay looks up, up from under. Wet eyes. Her tongue touches her top lip.

Decius swallows.

"My tribute," she pleads. "I have a feeling about this year. I know that sounds silly. But I haven't- not since…"

"Hey. Hey, no. Don't think about that." His thumb lifts her chin. "Why don't I- tell you what. We're gonna sign a little preliminary. A little conditional...how's this? I'll sign for it right now. A hundred k, conditionally, for when, uh, the munchkin makes the fifth day. That's easy, right? All right, come on. One more. Can't let you miss that train."

One more kiss on the cheek from tiptoe. She leaves a tear on the bridge of his nose like a crystal. A shiver goes through his shoulders. "My knight in shining houndstooth."

"That's me." With a genial, outdone sigh, the Chairman draws up the contract on his mobile, taps in the number, and signs, reversing the screen for her confirmation. "Get something special with that."

"I promise. I've got to go, it's already pulling in. Thank you, Dec- and lunch! I won't forget. You'll see me when they play the Reapings. Keep your channel tuned!"

"You'll be the death of me, woman." He clutches his chest. She really is hurrying now, heels clacking on marble, and he's forced to raise his voice over the incoming whirr of the train. "May the odds!"

"Ever in my favor." She blows a dry-eyed kiss. One more smile as she boards, an attendant helping her onto the stairs. Decius's cowlick is billowing in the wind. She thinks she would be able to part it with a knife from here. It's not for certain. But she is only fourteen years out, and her arms are still as steady as they are dainty. She was only fourteen when she made it through an Academy cull missing four fingernails and all the skin off her palms. They still have the recording of it somewhere in the files, her refusal to cry out, to even gasp. The Academy remembers everything.

There are no cameras in the second washroom. With the smile slipping off her face like cold oatmeal, Satin goes straight to it. She washes her face and her arms until the skin glows raspberry pink.

An avox knocks on the door with her tonic water. She takes it, rinses, and tosses it back, reaching for her cosmetics next. "A hundred k on the first day is enough for a jar of pears, a rack of lamb, a firestarting kit, and an all-weather sleeping bag." She reapplies foundation, rapidly dotting the brush in an even pattern across her cheeks. Powder puffs copiously into the mirror and sink. "A hundred k on the fifth day is enough for the firestarters."

The avox bows her head in apology.

"He's a tight-fisted mutt. I've had him around my finger since the fiftieth. Now he's mostly onto Lindell. He's too distractible. Wake me an hour before we're in the District."

The avox nods, and takes the tonic glass away.

Satin heads to her quarters, peeling off her dress and shoes at the door. She burrows under the heavy blanket and rests her eyes for ten minutes, counting off the seconds. The Academy teaches you to do that so you can time your private training sessions. She won't forget.

So Decius is slipping. It's not _her _fault- she hasn't gained a pound or a wrinkle since seventeen. It's simply that she's familiar. She's decade-old news. So much for brand loyalty. She kneads a pillow in her fists. It's...not as though she's starving for sponsors. You can't prance ten feet in the Capitol without running into a roving ad for Chanay Hair Products or Body Glitter. Two baking shows are fighting over her famous Strawberry Bloodbath Bombs, and her face has been digitally pasted to enough cheap X-holos to muster a league of horny teenage boys with their parents' pocket money.

She just...needs this year. She needs to get this one. She needs another chance.

Working alongside Rowella this year is going to be another formidable pain in the neck, and she'll need resources. She's going to get Amber Lindell on the line and work something over. She'll get the Governor of Tesserae's wife to return the favor for that appearance at her kid's birthday party. The discounted garden supplies voiceover is barely thirty k, but that's a third of a firestarting kit on the fifth day. Let's not be wasteful here. If you're not all in, you're telling your tribute they aren't worth it.

After 600 seconds, Satin rolls over, and reaches for the mobile on her nightstand so she can call her father. She needs one shot of good luck today. Just one.

* * *

"The graduating class is one of our record-setters. Numbers across the board are high in dexterity, loyalty, and magnetism. Of course, our washouts were also at a high."

Rowella slides a thumb over the handler's spotless console. Every surface is white or golden chrome in here. You can't tell night from day in the enclosure. They're really amping up this aesthetic, and she's not sure she's fond of it. "Five graduates, correct?"

"Two females, three males." The handler smiles with teeth that could channel solar power. Rowella glances at the nametag. 'Ruby.' Miner's kid. One of a passel, most likely. They get some of the most loyal ones out of there. They've lived hard enough to be grateful. "Miss Chanay will be commencing her Volunteer tomorrow, as coordinated. May I give you a brief showing of our current work before commencement?"

Rowella nods brusquely. "Accelerate it."

She starts down the corridor before Ruby can trot along with her clipboard. She should know the structure of it, anyway, besides the odd expanded facility or dorm block. She founded the place nigh on fifty years ago.

White, and gold, and silent. Windows overlook the tranquil inner courtyard. They pass the dormitories without comment. A week before the Games, training is easing off for everyone but the graduates, and many will be at recreation, or for the first time in months, sleeping in. Ruby checks her schedule and pauses outside a frosted glass door to swipe her card. Humid air washes out.

"Just a quick stop," she beams. Rowella raises an eyebrow. "Currently the ten year olds have the slot. We've recently implemented a full aquatic course."

A cluster of boys in short white trunks is grouped against the tile wall at the far end of a massive pool. Their quiet chattering cinches off instantly. Ruby claps her hands for them to line up. "Two laps."

"Decent coordination." Rowella crosses her broad arms as the boys streak through the warm water. She points with a pinky, low-voiced. "Cut number sixteen."

Ruby blinks, off-guard. That'd be points docked in interview prep, and a handler in her face with a brighter light, shouting her down. But she makes the note.

"He's too cautious. He doesn't power into it. He's saving his energy for later. If you don't throw yourself in, you won't get a later. He doesn't want the Games. He's wasting our time." The tall, hard-jawed woman points another knuckle. "And number seven," she indicates, as the children boost themselves onto the far end again. "Facial structure's too weak. I don't want it on Capitol screens."

Ruby makes an X on the list and orders ten further laps. Rowella points her chin once more. "Number two...restrict the protein. He's built for bulk. Needs to stay smooth."

Rowella is built with biceps and triceps to rival any Two, quadriceps like rebar. Her cropped hair is still dark. The Capitol engineers formulas and surgeries in a desperate race to beat advanced age, but the Victor maintains herself with the discipline of a new Volunteer. Only, they don't build Ones like her anymore. It's not the brand. The Capitol wants soft, pliable, shimmering young things who can kill like it's easy and promise the audience everything they ever wanted without saying a word. Rowella can sell that. The market is always changing.

They return to the hallway. Another quick stop turns out to be the gymnasium, occupied by a smaller group of fourteen year olds, lanky and golden. They perform against each other, proving themselves for the handler and Victor, all without acknowledging the presence of another person in the spacious room. The white athletic uniform is form-fitting. Number six, tall and curly-haired, jogs to the sidelines for a towel after his handsprings. As he passes, he casually strips off his shirt, slinging the towel over his brass-shiny shoulder. A darker-haired boy, number ten, tightens his jaw. Making the same move would only be copying now.

Rowella smirks. "Unsubtle, but I like six. Give him something for the initiative. And push number ten harder into image training or he'll be out before winter."

And they move to the final white room for the commencement.

Her hand slides over the frosted glass. There's a silhouette behind it of the boy. She's been waiting to see him in here for a long time.

"Everything's ready?" she checks. It's the oddest moment to stall. All of this she's done before.

"Everything's perfect."

Rowella leaves her behind, slides a card and enters this room that she's entered before, so many times. Pulled a couple of Victors. Lost too many of them. She stills her face, remote as the mountain caps. She'll get this one out.

The way he looks back at her, straight-backed and cold-eyed- he learned that from her. Small-framed and deadly quiet. A pale blond to her deep mahogany, with electric green eyes like a blow to the chest.

They're alone in the room, on either side of the pedestal, the crystal mock-Reaping bowl. He moves before she does, and she forces her feet to follow. Almost fumbles her hand to close over his. She can feel her heart. Stephenson's palm is cool and steady.

"The Academy of District One selects you for its highest appointment, Stephenson Coller," she tells her son. "Out of our graduates, we commence you."

He bows his head.

"Reach into the bowl for your token."

Stephenson sifts through the multicolored powder and closes his hand around a small shape. Draws out a synthesized ruby. She closes her other hand around it, linking them doubly.

"Should you achieve victory, you will keep your jewel. Should you fail your appointment, it will return to us." To the bowl of colors shimmering like dead eyes. Jewels ground into sand.

"Do you accept your appointment as Volunteer?"

_Yes, _she thinks, at the same time as _no._

"Yes," he says dispassionately. As if he has somewhere else to go. Something to do. What has he ever done for himself?

Their hands are locked, ringed around the bowl of sand. Her fingers are larger than his. Neither of them makes the move to break free. Rowella is filled with a pride and unease and aching that sinks all the way to the core of her.

* * *

**(Hi! I apologise for the wait- I went through a frustrating number of drafts for the end of this chapter, and probably will edit it again. I would deeply appreciate your reviews, criticism, and any submissions you could throw my way. Thank you for reading!)**


	4. District Ten: Notoriety

_Reaping Day._

* * *

The swiftness of the train is nigh imperceptible. After all the time Colt's spent riding it up and down from Capitol to Ten, she still gets the urge to check the windows, watch the scenery streak past her. Make sure they haven't closed her in a finely-appointed box. Boots propped on a finely-appointed ottoman, she nods at the projection on the wall.

"Ha. Do you see that? Watch this part again. Pay more attention."

Her tribute bleakly fumbles for the remote, rewinding the tape several seconds. Ten's Victor of fifteen years past mounts the stage in sharp strides. The energy in her small frame is like a steel spring, and the commentators pick up on it. She curls her lip at the cameras, brushing off the hollow applause. When her partner is marched up, a field hand more than a foot taller with at least forty pounds on her, their handshake is a single jerk that makes him wince.

"You can pause. What was his name?"

The girl shrugs.

"Of course you don't know. Nobody cares. He's gone." Colt shrugs back exaggeratedly. "Decomposed. Maybe nourishing grass. The Careers, what were their names?"

"I don't know, okay? I was two when this was live."

"Good try, ray of sunshine. They replay all district Victors' Games in school. Keep thinking."

Ray of sunshine- Rumen, wasn't it- presses her head against the plush burgundy couch. The color scheme in here is not comforting. From oxblood to rust, and marble in organic liver-pink swirls for the countertops. Colt suspects they did it on purpose. "I don't know. I have no idea. Fi- Fiona. The girl from District Four. Is that-?"

"Astonishingly, correct. Must not have been passing notes and chatting shit with your girlfriends that day. Why do you remember her?"

She squints at the frozen feed of the 46th Games like a weasel contemplating long division. "They played her on screen the most. I mean, besides you. She took over the Careers after the wolves got the Two guy. She had- she had- red hair. I think."

"I hate this job." Colt takes a pull from her flask. The cap rattles as she seals it in tight, deliberate twists, punctuating every other word. "Probably, you will never know how much. If, in a year, due to outrageous whims of fate, you are riding this train again, speaking with a glassy-eyed adolescent whose skillset covers 'hair-braiding' and 'sometimes paying attention to free lifesaving material,' you will begin to understand."

Rumen touches her short braids before she pulls back, narrowing her eyes. A pulse of anger trapped somewhere in this stringy girl. Good. "Fiona and you were on screen the most because...you had a rivalry. You were the showdown."

"Play her Reaping."

The tape rewinds. Other than Ten, Four gets the longest Reaping spot. The boy goes first, forgettable and too young. And when Fiona volunteers-

"Play it again," Colt says, while Rumen is already reaching for the button.

They watch the red-haired girl make long, easy strides to the stairs, waving carelessly, with lean strength wired in her limbs and an arrogant slash of a smile. Her handshake whitens the boy's knuckles.

"Obviously, nothing coordinated," Colt says in an acrid plume of vodka. She points with the flask. "If somebody else won, nobody would care. But I did when I watched the feed."

It lines them up as the Reapings slide into the Capitol, the chariots. Colt's bluntness and Fiona's edge are everywhere. Brief shots of them edited into long, knowing stares, and a slip downward to the Ten's tightening fist. When Fiona rides out in the brilliant, striped colors of a venomous sea snake, Colt's hair and cloak are pulled back, ragged sand-brown. A trickster coyote. They still tell those stories at home. The girl bares her canines, left unpolished and chipped.

"You set each other up for it," Rumen says quietly, arms folded. "You made each other part of the story."

Colt raises an eyebrow. "Well done. You approach the low end of my expectations."

"But you didn't just win that way. You already knew how to- the knives, and hiding in the dark."

"True. I would've won on my own. But Gamemakers can kill anyone with a trap or a mutt. Doesn't matter if you're the strongest. Only thing that will make them _want_ you alive is a story they can sell."

Rumen looks down at herself, fingering the checked linen of her Reaping dress. Probably the only clothing of value she has ever owned. She's not the most pitiful tribute Colt's had, by a long shot, but she's not a lot to look at. Seventeen years old, sunburnt and gawky. Middle class. Medium height. Average all the way to her shoe size.

"Not much to work with. But we have a shot." Colt steps over and pokes her spine with stiff fingers. "Sit up. Back straight. Always slouching, the teenagers. You didn't freak out at your Reaping. Walked calm."

"I was in shock-"

"I know you were in shock. Do I believe you're some miracle killer with iron balls? Bullshit. But the Capitol doesn't know better. Now watch your Reapings. The current feed. Find a rival, someone you can mirror. It could almost look like you know what you're doing."

Even while she chews on her cheek, she's switching to the current Reaping coverage, playing on every commentary feed in Panem. "That's the most important thing?" she asks, dread and dismal hope muddled in her face.

"Yes. You need it. Make them believe you have it." Colt grins long, cracked yellow teeth. "Notoriety."

* * *

Azriel won without picking up a weapon, and nobody will ever do it again. His tributes ask him how to get out unbloodied. They plead for the secret trick, as if it's just a switch they could press. More than even surviving, they think he can show them how to win without guilt.

Shoulders and elbows withdrawn at odd angles, he ducks his head, and rubs his eyes under the weight of their desperation. The reality is too cruel to spill. _Oh, kid. That isn't what I won._

Like as not, they'll never have to find that out.

Brody is the boy's name. He's sixteen and lived over his family's butcher shop. Not much sun damage on him, and he's well-fed, with big hands. Big shoulders. He knows how to use tools. He prepared his own plate when he got on the train, slicing cuts of beef and dark bread- only the things familiar to him, while he ignored the fresh fruit and desserts that had Rumen stunned. He's ignored Azriel too. Silent hostility steams off him like stink from roadkill three days old.

Az waits for a better moment. He could get to Brody if he needed to now, but it'll help them both if the shell opens first. He waits patiently in the dining car. Colt moves her girl to the viewing room. Brody is a stormcloud pinned inside a boy, ozone-heavy, chewing through his defiantly simple rations. He moves only around the other end of the car.

After a while, Az breaks out his beading kit. He sends an apologetic twitch of a smile to Brody. "Keeps my hands busy."

The knife saws roughly through the loaf again. Az turns to the box of tiny glass beads and string. Partly, this is therapeutic. They let him do it in the institution. His hands aren't steady, but he can concentrate on these little points of color instead of all the dangers of a human. All the...

The knife is grating. Lamplight splinters through the beads. He shakes his head and bends closer to them. He's running a sequence of crystal blues and greens. The other thing is, this is something that he can create. And if it falls apart- it's nothing living. It's fine if it isn't perfect. The pattern can be broken.

Brody thumps onto the cushion next to him. Azriel's hands tense in his lap like white butterflies, and go still. He unknots the string from them. "I'll make you some tea before we begin. It'll help you focus. You're going to want-"

"That's what I want, huh? Tea and some cute mind tricks?" The boy's face is carved from the mesa. "You figuring out what backwood allies to stick me with? Get them to take care of the business. I'll just turn around on them later, right?"

Azriel sighs. The beads roll between his thumbpads. "Sounds like that would be a wash. I-I don't have to put you with allies. You can still apply my instructions-"

"I don't need your fucking instructions, Ryder." He doesn't look around, doesn't take his eyes off the wall. His fists dig into his knees. "You know what I do all day?"

"You prepare the meat. Sometimes it's- it's shipped to you, but you keep pigs in the yard too. Divide up the carcasses, wrap them in paper. Left-hander. The shoulder's...bigger. You would have one of those harnesses for the animals. You cut their throats in it." Azriel rubs his ear. "You enjoy that part, Brody?"

"You should be teaching the party tricks to the girl. Not like they'd help her either. At least Flanagan's got a Victor."

"...Yeah. Miguel killed six tributes in seven days with a length of pipe. He never comes out of his house, and I hear him breaking furniture for hours at night. He doesn't sleep, he doesn't talk, and I- I don't know what he eats. That isn't what you want."

"You're a weak fucking bastard." Brody's voice shakes. "Do some of that analysis. Figure me out. Am I going to win by talking a guy off a ledge to the mutts? You show your tributes that stuff, and they think they can do it. And they all die."

He reaches for Azriel's shoulders. In a flinch, blue and green beads scatter across the floor; Azriel acts automatically to lock Brody's wrists. His breath is noisy and wet, trapped in his throat.

"Get me the bread knife." He lets go. Whitened fingerprints flush purple. He wipes his forehead, where his hair is sticking in damp curls. A nauseous pulse drums somewhere in his stomach. "Keep it sheathed. I-I-I'll show you what you're asking for."

You can't win without guilt. You can't win without blood. He knew the smell of both even before they put him in the arena.

Every year, he tries to forget all of it, but every tribute scratches it up again, and he doesn't know how much he can scar before it'll all bleed free.


	5. District Four: Sparrow

_A month before Reaping Day._

* * *

The floor and walls are transparent glass, filled with brilliantly-colored swimming fish. Adrian keeps thinking he's going to fall through. Twelve stories up, the sight roils motion sickness and a spinning ache behind his eyes. He can't lean against the wall, because there's just koi and open city behind it. He doesn't know how the women in heels are doing this. Some of them even have fish _inside _the heels. Partygoers clasp his tanned arms and coo over him while he tries not to squeeze his eyes shut and hyperventilate. The music thumps and echoes like the inside of a tunnel, out of sync with his hammering heartbeat. He would've tried to make an exit hours ago, but, well. He's the guest of honor. Victor of the Sixtieth. Their newest shining star, for another month or two.

It's almost sweet, he supposes, that somebody thought the Four would appreciate fish. He wonders if they think anyone from the district can actually afford an aquarium.

People touch him, offer him bits of food on cocktail sticks and bubbly drinks in glasses shaped like cerith shells. They all smell like spices and citrus and sweet, metallic musk. They say things to him while the light bounces off their glittering skin, and he laughs with them. Sometimes they're actually funny. It gets harder to tell. He feels the room slipping out from under him in slick, warm waves. An older woman, some Governor, or Gamemaker, he can't remember, feeds him a pineapple cube, and Adrian smiles and says something he hopes is coherent, gripping the grand piano behind him like the ladder out of the arena. He takes a deep breath and then somebody else is pressing another shotglass into his hand, a sticky crimson-pink. Tastes like cherries. The pressure in his head builds to dizzying levels, and then releases. He feels as though he has unlatched and floated outside of himself. His heart slows to the rhythm of the beat. He loses sense of time.

"Adrian," someone's saying in his ear down there, loud. Clicking their fingers. They pull him toward a corner. He struggles to stay on his feet. They're too far away, and there are possibly four of them, making trails of light as they move. But he tries not to resist. They told him he can't resist. His mentor told him to laugh and smile and never tell anyone no, because if the Capitol doesn't like him the President will find out, and something could happen to his dad, and Adrian's trying so hard to follow and smile at the same time that his legs tangle up. Someone catches him before he skids. The man guides him the rest of the way to the couch with a broad arm under his shoulder. He doesn't smell like a Capitol person.

He asks for water, mumbling around his tongue. The man pulls one from a passing Avox's tray, but doesn't give it to him. He cracks open a plastic case of pills, dissolving two in the glass. "No, I don't want more of those," Adrian slurs. He can't help it. He tries to push himself away with taffy for muscles. "I don't want to take any more."

"This is the last one you're taking," the man says, calm but edged with anger, and that isn't the same either- Capitol people don't get angry. Cross, or sullen, or pouty, but nothing as hard and resilient as anger. And he's scarred. They don't keep their scars here. "You're going to feel better. Knock it back, Waller."

They don't call him Waller in the Capitol. They like to call him Adri. _Come over and sit with us, Adri! Oh, my goodness, just look at him- turn your head, Adri- look at his poor ear! That's where Rapture got you with that knife, isn't it? My brother was betting on Rapture. But I was always, _always_ betting on _you, _Adri-_

He chokes down the water. It tastes like battery acid. He clamps his fingers over his mouth when he nearly gags it up. Slowly, sensations start to sting as the blood rushes back to his head. His skin feels pinched and inflamed. His throat and eyes are burning dry. When he shifts his arms, tingling under their sheer layer of mesh, he realizes he's drenched in sweat.

Adrian pants quietly, hands splayed on his knees. The man is leaning over him. The slashed face and single arm of his co-mentor are finally coming recognizable, like a charcoal rubbing of a grave.

"Did Luther send you?" Adrian croaks, working his tongue through the pasty film on his teeth.

"Sent myself. I'm not so much a fan of the 'sink or swim' method. At least not for your first year." Kaito Ebihara snags another drink from a platter, takes a cautionary sip, and passes it to him. "Just soda. Rinse your mouth out, and we'll head to the balcony."

Adrian obediently swishes and swallows. He's not sure the sugar is going to help the migraine squatting in his frontal lobe like a grunting, territorial boar.

"Good man. Let's get you up. The balcony isn't see-through, thank Snow for little wonders. I'll scare off anyone who wants to follow us out for a bit."

"I'm going to throw up," Adrian says indistinctly, gripping the front of his shirt.

"Run that by me again?"

"I'm going to throw up." He staggers toward the sliding doors, trying not to lock eyes with a partygoer, a governor, or a fish. "Everywhere."

Over the delicate silver railing, filigreed with seaweed and merpeople, he does. Four times in a row.

* * *

While Kaito cleans him up, the kid talks. Most of it doesn't make sense- he's still coming off the trip. Spasms go through his shoulders. The clammy sweat stands out on his upper lip. It's clear that it isn't comfortable for him to swallow, but he obeys whenever Kaito makes him rinse. His heart hurts. The boy is too young.

Adrian talks about mentoring. He says he's made a horrible mistake.

"I shouldn't be doing it my first year out. I thought I could do it but I'm not ready. I'm not...it isn't fair to him." Adrian rolls the base of his water glass in dreamlike circles. "I've already killed him. He'll know that. And he trained for this, and I didn't. He spent years just to get here and I've...killed him."

"You don't know that. You _never _know how the Games could play out before they're done." Kaito makes a list on his fingers, which, tragically, can only go to five. "The Ten who never made a kill. Big kid from Six, year before you. Fourteen year old in the 55th. Back-to-back district victories from Three, Five, Nine-"

"But those are trends from the 50's. They won't want that again for this decade." Adrian is curled up in the curve of the railing, hunched between his shoulders. "And they didn't have a first-time mentor. I'm not even ready to- to live on my own yet. I look down at the fish in there and I'm seeing the lake I drowned Rapture in, and people kept coming up behind me, and if I wasn't drugged I would've broken somebody's neck. And they're just touching, all the time, and that film star with emerald fingernails contracted me last night-" He hisses and scrubs at his eyes, lowering his voice even though the party behind the closed sliding doors is enough to drown out any recording feed. "He says I'm his favorite. I don't want- I can't handle any of this-"

"My first year out, I did break someone's neck," Kaito says, settling against the railing beside him. The multicolored lights refract through the aquarium walls, chasing strange reflections over their faces, outlining the deep crevice that crosses his nose and cheeks. He gives Adrian a moment to process.

"I was actually on my Victory Tour. End of the line, made it to the Capitol, made it through the President's ball. And my stylist wanted to take me out one more time before I went home. Dragged me to Cicero, over there." He points to the matte black spire near the center of the city. It absorbs the light pollution like a hole ripped in the sky. Adrian's eyes widen. He's picked up some things early. "Yeah. Ended up wishing I'd stayed at the ball. We got in, got our masks assigned. I had an eagle. My stylist was a fox. Turns out, there were a lot of foxes. And in a place like that- crammed full, with the strobes and fog- I lost her pretty quick. It was too warm. Felt like the side of that fucking volcano they dropped me on. I thought it'd be easier to breathe if I got to the next floor."

He takes a drink from Adrian's soda and wipes his mouth, then produces a sealed box of herbed biscuits from his bag. Still fresh. He breaks one open and holds it under his nose, shutting his eyes with contentment. "You want one? Arnav packed them for me. He says Capitol food's shit for nutrition and he'll send me straight to the couch if he sees me at the dessert table in a publicity photo."

He earns a watery smirk from Adrian, who takes the biscuit half and starts to nibble on the edge. Tiny progress, but it's progress. Kaito looks back across the skyline to the tall, opaque specter of Cicero.

"Each floor's more expensive as you go up, more specified tastes. I just swiped my Victor's ID and I could go anywhere. It starts out...fine. Typical drugs. Weird sex. Everyone's in the masks. You don't know if that's Caesar Flickerman or Rowella Dovell or the President. And at some point you're too fascinated- too shocked to stop. You have to know how much worse it can get. They get younger as you go up," he adds absently. That's a part he's spent a good eight years trying not to picture. "Not the clients."

He bites into rosemary and thyme, grounding himself in Four. At home.

"I didn't make it all the way to the top. Couldn't tell you what they're buying in the penthouse. I was most of the way up, keeping my distance from an interesting exhibit involving a bear. Not a bear mask, the real thing. And I was lost. I was in shock, seeing tributes at the corners of my eyes. Wasn't great. And...a woman in a sparrow mask took my shoulder and guided me back downstairs. I was still glassy. Turned around to thank her. There was a strobe light, or something, flashing off her glove, and I thought she was raising a knife. I-"

Kaito knocks his hand crookedly against the railing.

"I found out she was an Avox later. Would've been consequences, otherwise. Arnav does breathing exercises with me when I dream about her. You- I think you're doing all right, Waller. You can handle this. One day at a time. Like all the rest of us."

Adrian stares at him with trapped wild animal eyes. Kaito's seen the same ones in the mirror for eight years.

"It doesn't get better?" he whispers. "It just stays?"

"It gets worse. More kids every year. More arenas. More spectacle." Kaito hugs Adrian roughly, letting the boy's damp face sink into his shoulder. "But we get better. And sometimes we get them out."

"Is it worth it? Is this worth saving them for?" He looks so tired. The cool wind sticks his shirt to him, scatters his pale hair around his face. Seventeen years old. Kaito remembers being seventeen and thinking he was invincible.

He doesn't let go. "It's always worth it. Always."

Bruises like thunderclouds around Adrian's eyes. The dry sound of vertebrae snapping. Contracts with film stars. Cicero. Every night Kaito wakes up his husband because the faces come back. Unmarked child coffins. The brimstone smell of hell on Earth. The lava pools. One day he's going to bring back his own tribute, out of their own two weeks of nightmare into one that never ends. He's going to tell them the same thing.

It has to be worth it.

* * *

**(District Six next- have had problems with the formatting. I hope you've enjoyed so far. I would love your feedback!)**


	6. District Six: Mirrors

_Reaping Day._

* * *

Etan is too tall for the shower, and he doesn't like baths, generally. He doesn't like the submerging part. Right now he's crouched in the tub, facing a trickle from the faucet that digs into his scarred, fish-pale shin. He wets a washcloth and finds areas to scrub. His stubbled chin is prickly between his knees. Eyes bleared shut, he goes by touch, guiding his elbows through the narrow quarters. The prep team is going to lay an egg when they see what they have to work with, and the Reaping only hours away.

The running water blends into rolling waves. He opens one eye to an aquatic shimmer on the ceiling, floating in the humid, slippery warmth, salt stinging in his nose and mouth. His lungs are about to split. _If he doesn't breathe now, he never will._

He shuts his eye again until he drains the tub, towels off, and pokes his head out the door. His house is quiet and dark, and the air is dry. He chews on his scabbed lip. Nobody's out here. He's by himself.

Yeah, all right. He turns around to retrieve his glasses, smearing the moisture off them with his waistband.

Etan shuffles down the hall in an old pair of boxers and a hideous pair of orange socks. His shoulders bunch forward; his gait is an older man's. He's only twenty years out. In the plain kitchen, he dips into the icebox for some soya noodles, digging them out of the paper box with his fingers. He paces while he eats. Straightens a chair or two. Turns on a light. He rolls down the window shades, then reconsiders. Noodles dangle down his chin as he hunts through the upper cabinets. He pulls out a squat blue bottle, rattles it. Four left. There'll be a stock for him on the train. He tips back two that melt bitter on his tongue. For his nerves, mostly. For the prep team.

He wonders if he will make it back to this house. There isn't much to miss about it, but the thought is not comfortable.

He drops the rest of the noodles into the bin, slides down to sit by it, and lowers his forehead into his legs.

A warm, crushing squeeze by some baby-pink form of cotton candy wakes him up. There is even more of it in the frontal region than he remembered.

"Polly," he grunts, a pained half-grin cracking the corners of his lips. "Hi. I- uhf- good to see you. Is this-" He awkwardly indicates with his shoulder. "Are those safe to be- pressurized?"

"They're durable, honey, I paid enough for them." Polyhymnia Parsh is more than durable herself. She ruffles his hair and lifts him up under the arms, dusting him off with a strong lilac-gloved hand. There are not a lot of women who match Etan's height. In kitten heels, she beats him by three inches.

They regard each other, Polly's eyes full of a deep, stable affection. Officially retired, the stylist returns exclusively for Etan's public appearances. She'd taken a shine since the beginning. She hardly looks different from the day of his first chariot rides, and has indeed been celebrating her forty-fifth birthday for about a decade. She goes for another hug, swooping to kiss both cheeks.

"I am appalled with your upkeep, but unsurprised. I knew you'd look like a raccoon made a mistake with an orangutan. The team is waiting outside. Shall I let them in yet?"

"That's fine. Yeah." He rubs the bags under his eyes. "No beauty base 0. Please. Not the plucking."

"Of course not. I'm going to stick you in slacks like a civilized man. Your speedo days are long over, my dear." She winks and straightens his glasses, and heads for the front door. "And stop nibbling on those lips, or I'll coat them in something rancid."

He smirks wearily and salutes with two fingers before the team descends on him like butterflies for blood.

_Hands are on his neck under the water and his face grinds into the sand. He's gagging on it. And he's reaching back above him with his eyes pulsing red light, and the girl's hair is hanging. He-_

Etan blinks at the ring of vanity lights. Bedenia is combing something volumizing through his widow's peak, shaping it into something a little less orangutan. Lucillus and Fiera tag-team the state of his complexion. Polly has the slacks draped over her arm while she takes in a gray jacket around his waist, clucking over his weight loss.

Yeah. All right.

He can't keep doing this. He can't do this every year. Nobody comes back with him. Maybe that would've made it different. Maybe, maybe, but it's only a symptom of the disease.

If he doesn't breathe now he never will.

"Polly," he mumbles into her hair. "It's this year."

"I'm sorry, honey?"

"It's this year."

She pauses with the jacket, reorienting the flash of shock on her face. Her voice is barely a tickle in his ear. "But without the Gamemaker- are we all in?"

"Enough of us. Couldn't talk to you earlier. They listen to my phone."

"It can't be the 65th? And you were supposed to be working with Gill-"

"No more time. They're trying to push all the youngest mentors in, cut us off- they've been suspecting. They're too close to us."

"Are we close enough to get through _them?_"

She's aged in a couple of seconds. The slacks unfold and hit the floor like a sledgehammer. Nobody hears anything.

Bedenia and Fiera are in agreement over the slick, unpleasant sensation of Chanay body glitter, although Lucillus's defense is so apoplectic he nearly stuffs lip balm into Etan's nose.

He and Polly gaze in silence.

His pores and scalp are stinging. And he feels queasy, and very tired. The pills, of course. They should've kept him down for longer. He softly see-saws one hand.

"Close enough," he says. "Nearly close enough."

If they aren't, they won't have much longer to worry about it.

* * *

Killian kneels down to button the back of Diona's dress, a spine of pearl beads that concludes under the sheet of her shiny hair. He's been buttoning the same dress for her these past four years. They're well off enough to change it every month, if they wanted- more than enough- but it's not the same thing with Reaping clothes. You push those to the back of the closet. Separate them in the drawer. Reaping clothes have a contaminant, a death smell.

He tugs on the back of her collar when he gets to it. "Still fits?"

She twists around, sticks her tongue out, and clatters out of the room like a goat in her buckled shoes. That's something else that hasn't changed, the little asshole. Sometimes he appreciates that. Sometimes he's not sure. Gill had told him everything was going to be different when he got out.

His clothes were sent in advance by the stylists. Slimming vertical stripes on the jacket, blue and white. That's...thoughtful of them. He slowly fixes his tie, stalling the minutes before he has to join the bustling atmosphere downstairs, and hoping at the same time that somebody will come to find him.

He waits ten more minutes before he goes.

In the kitchen, his father has camped out at the new coffee machine. His mother is circling Rossel with a lint roller, which picks the crumbs off his suit as quickly as the man can scarf down his toast. Ross spots Killian first and waves him closer, gifting him a lopsided, messy pat on the back. Their mother aggrievedly switches targets.

"This is a _lovely _jacket, Killian. They sent it specially for you from the _Capitol._ You've got to learn to take care of these things."

"What? What did _I_ do?"

"You heard her." Ross grins and flicks his ear. His brother is like a mirror into what Killian should have been. Dark hair that actually forms a shape, and doesn't stick flat to his head. The propensity to tan rather than blister. A jawline. Proportions. And there's...the rest of it. "It is _weird_ to me knowing you're po-faced back there on the stage while I'm jawing on the Treaty of Treason. I remember when we used to make fun of that bull on the way home."

"_Ross,_" their mother squawks. "Not today, for Snow's sake. Don't let Diona start saying those things."

"She's dressed, by the way." Killian points out her billy-goat tread in the foyer as he maneuvers out of reach of the lint roller. "Helped her finish up. Remember when she would tear off her shoes and socks and hide them so we'd be late?"

His mother has resumed the scouring of Ross, who accepts it like a martyr, and retaliates with a brief yet mildly scandalous anecdote. Killian waits a minute, then smiles, and passes through to the living room. His father bumps him on the shoulder with hard, knobbed knuckles. For an instant his brain flashes through the moment when he peeled desperate fingers from the edge of a roof.

"Jacket's good on you." The old man fiddles with Killian's tie. There can't possibly be anything wrong with it, but he grunts and allows him to buzz off after a set of minimal adjustments. "You'll do us proud out there this year."

"This year, huh?" Killian cracks a bigger smile. Sure. Maybe his second tribute won't get herself paralyzed by snakebite and drowned in three inches of water. Maybe the Capitol kids have stopped circulating the animated images of his stomach bouncing in slo-mo as he runs for his life. Maybe this year he won't be the joke. Maybe they requested him back to the mentors' ring this year because they're _fond _of him. "Thanks, Dad. Doing my best."

His father nods, as though he has imparted state secrets, and resumes a deep meditation over his coffee. Killian buzzes off.

The escort's here too, making his presence known with whatever passes for music pouring out of his earphones- Dorian, who appears to be foaming over with white bubbles from the neckline and platinum hairpiece. With his tiny, wretched blue poodle under his arm, he stalks fragrantly from one side of the house to the other, strewing incense and fine glitter and dishes of candy aphrodisiacs in his wake like a haute natural disaster, somehow molding the chaos into something that could belong on camera. They're planning to shoot some background footage for his Talent. He squeezes Killian's shoulder tightly as he goes by.

"You're on for a reading while you're in the city, big boy. Apparently your book's been a hit!"

"Oh, nice. That's...great. Which one? I've done a few this year."

Dorian snorts and pinches his cheek. "You've done others? I refer to your _pièce de résistance_ on Stonebrook's Games. We do love a Two, don't we? I've got the hardback right on my coffee table. I treasure it deeply."

Killian suspects Dorian's preference in literature extends no further than Reaping slips and erotica, but he gives a thumbs up. "Appreciate it. I'm sure I'll see you in line for that reading."

"Never doubt it," he cooes, already on his way to the kitchen. The poodle bounces miserably in the crook of his elbow. "Love the jacket, by the way."

Killian rubs the welt on his cheek. "Thanks. Apparently it's been a hit."

He goes out onto the front porch for air.

The summer is pleasant, even through the pervasive gray smog that pollutes so many young children's lungs with pneumonia and curses them with allergies. He wrote a paper on that once. Killian sits on the stairs, glancing up the line of Village houses to Etan's, darkened and lonely; to Gill's, fading and peeling. Her automobile's in the driveway. Maybe he should go in and see how she's holding up.

She told him everything would be different.

He picks at grit in the seam of the porch, and carefully, deliberately smudges it up and down the collar of his jacket.

He pushed his ex-girlfriend off the roof of a schoolhouse arena, and a sketch show called him the Custard Cream Killer when he dropped so much weight that his skin drooped in bunches around his waist. The least these people could do is act like it fucking happened at all.

* * *

Gill doesn't show up to the stage. It's just the kid, Killian, making big eyes at Etan that he can't give an answer to. He stands stolidly, posture sagging lower the longer Dorian keeps them out here. Fields of sweating children cough into their sleeves and face down the Reaping balls with the gravitas of those already without hope. Look at their mentors. A broken-down matchstick and a green boy. You can't blame any of them.

Etan is thinking about Thirteen, and about the Gamemaker they don't have, and the co-mentor he didn't get. How many of the other districts have had their newest pressured to the front? He fears the conference in the Capitol will be far emptier than he had planned for. There's been word that even Lorne won't be coming out of Nine. They can fill in with Zachary, but already, the losses are a major blow...

He actually misses the first name that Dorian gets around to, and blinks himself back to awareness. They'll be having a hoot with this on the commentators' channels. _Whatever Dacker's having, I'll have two!_

It's the girl, Killian's assignment. Sixteen and sturdy-boned and flat-faced as a Persian cat. Dorian announces her again, probably for the benefit of her stunned parents. Her name turns out to be Tacita. Etan hopes that she will not die in pain. He can't afford her more than that.

His own tribute is called Marcel. Thin, lanky, with photogenic cheekbones and some curl to his hair. He's eighteen, and he's almost crying, but he composes himself, staring far up into space with his fingers knotting behind his back.

Etan can't tell him anything to make him feel better. He's not going to lie to him. Tributes are smarter than that.

He is thinking of Thirteen. The plan. The Gamemaker. The young mentors. Polyhymnia, who would have been safe if she hadn't kept coming back for him. Gill, and Lorne, and he isn't sure who else yet. He's thinking, already, of the letter he will write to Marcel's family in place of their son.

He wonders if his house will be razed this year, sending the ashes of all the unsent letters spiraling up into a gray sky from which they will not return.

* * *

**(Your feedback is highly appreciated!)**


	7. District Three: Blue

_One week before Reaping Day._

* * *

By luck, Easton killed a little girl and a boy half his size again; he found a trickle of water to suck from a crack in the stone, and outlasted the final Four who had the Capitol salivating into their cocktails, because the guy was too wounded to drag a canteen to his mouth. It's safe to say Easton hadn't been the pick of the litter. It's accurate to say he was dosed so high on his Victory Tour that he couldn't have picked out the faces of Marco's family if they'd vaulted the stage to tear his arms off. Maybe it's cruel to say that he rewatched him dying as the train sped away. Marco's tongue shriveled and poking in and out like a turtle's head, unable to moisten his lips. The tight, sick sheen of his skin in hi-def. Panning shots of his shirt glued to the ground with blood once he was too weak to roll over. That was the boy who was supposed to kill him. And he'd been wholly ready for it, tucked into his crevice with his hands over his face. It wasn't supposed to be _his _finale. When the trumpets blast, you can see the pure shock on him. It's two minutes until he starts to unfold himself, waiting for the trap. The catch.

Now he twists little statues out of wire on a live feed for Capitolites. All teenagers. Apparently they find his narration relaxing. It's ten in the evening, and his viewer count is in the thirties. Life is very weird.

"We're gonna twist this little bit into a loop, and we're gonna slide that through. Bunny ears," he says gently. "It's going great. And I'll fix its tail here. Not round enough. We can't, um, have with that. Careful and don't pinch your fingers."

Someone pings in an inappropriate comment about what else he could do with his fingers. Three indignant commenters shut them down right away. Easton murmurs some form of appreciation, tucks his knee under his chin, and continues to form the bunny. His viewer count remains solid until he signs off and heads to the room down the hall.

"I think young people in the Capitol don't _like _the Games," he tells Aldera, who stares at him with a sort of alarmed pity, as though there is a contagious mold growing out of his face.

"I think the _second highest_ viewership block is the thirteen to mid-twenties demographic. Because I got the newest mentor brochure in days ago." She taps on it in the pocket of her chair. "Almost all the ads are geared for them- visit famous arenas and dress up for reenactments, learn sword-fighting from real training instructors. All the trivia games. Cartoon shows with guest spots. 'What Victor are you most like?' quizzes."

"Oh, reliable sources. One of those quizzes told me I was a dead match for Zachary Still." He half-grins at her. The corner of her mouth curls, but her grave attention hasn't fully receded. With an air of magnanimity, she gestures to the neat periwinkle coverlet of her bed. Easton flops backward and rucks it up instantly. She rolls herself away from her desk and brains him with a pillow until he's barricaded his face behind his arms.

"My parents are asleep," she hisses. Easton muffles his snort. "I'm serious. I told them you'd be going home by nine."

"I guess they still think I might crawl in and cut their throats."

He glances down. Maybe not as light as he was aiming for. Aldera's knuckles slip to her cheek. Something frigid seeps into the brief warmth of the air.

"It's not like that. Not as much anymore. They used to lock the doors because of me, too, E." She tugs through a knot in her short black hair. "They don't let me cook anything. I used to think they were just being helpful, because it's harder to reach things, but...I realized they don't want to risk me _poisoning _them. Like I used the toadstools just for fun. Like it turned me into a serial killer."

Easton folds the pillow under his chin, regarding his friend. Their conditions made them practically sibling Victors, her year right after his own. There are not a lot of other people they can talk to.

"I hate how much they hold us accountable. We were fifteen," she says. "We couldn't even drive motor vehicles."

"You can't even drive one now."

Bereft of pillows, Aldera calls him a son of a bitch and guiltily covers her mouth. Easton is repressing laughter. Friendship's pretty alright. He never made a lot of those in school.

Nineteen and eighteen. Both of them should still have been in school. In another world, the most interesting thing that's happened to Easton Watts is a fried circuit in the lab and an emergency defibrillation. His grandfather doesn't step around him like he's a bomb about to go off, and his deadbeat cousin doesn't creep to the gates of the Victors' Village day after day, asking humbly for another bill paid off, another grand to cover his ass in the betting rings, come on, you can afford it, man, you earned it, you can afford anything. And over there, Aldera never knew the smell of an ancient pine forest or the bloody foam forced through a flattened windpipe. She chatters with the popular girls, and she still walks, with unconscious, unthought grace in her steps.

"I think young people in the Capitol don't like the _Games," _he says. Aldera quiets down. The nervous twitch under her eye is evident as a signpost. In some of the outer districts, the superstitious old folks say that Snow can hear you when you talk treason, can watch your every move if you've been bad. In Three, they know it's no superstition. Easton scans for bugs every weekend and plays a static feed while he sleeps.

"They like the Victors. They like _us. _Not the Games."

"But they're obsessed with the Games. The merchandise isn't just about us. Stuffed mutts, holo-game simulations. 'Have lunch with a real Gamemaker' fundraisers. They can't get enough of it."

"Okay, maybe. It's fun for them. But I think a lot of them still have empathy for tributes. While they're still the same _age _as us. Their parents know we're just district trash. The kids think we might actually be real people like them. And they like the Victors the most because they get to follow us long enough to _prove _it."

"But how does that matter? Is that supposed to mean something?" She frowns. With Easton's help, she boosts herself out of her wheelchair and sits on her bed against the wall. Her thin legs are ashen next to Easton's milk-pale. "They're not going to do anything about it."

"You remember them teaching about the uprising during the Nineteenth?"

"The one with just three districts that lasted for a week, blew up the Head Gamemaker's house and a hotel, and got all the rebel families _massacred_?"

"I didn't say it was a _long _uprising. Listen, those were the only things they told us in school. 'Lasted a week, detonated two buildings, killed the rebel families.' But I've been researching it for months now. I've been looking for its connection to the Capitol. And the people who actually got blown up there." He eyes her cautiously. "They tell us district nutcases did it, because they have to. But two locations isn't a shoddy achievement for Nine, Eleven, and Twelve. I know they were involved. Some of them got caught in the Capitol. But you can't infiltrate the Head Gamemaker's place without inside people. And they tell us the hotel was random terrorism, but so many things are actually pointing to-"

"Stop."

* * *

Aldera's shaky voice dips below a whisper. She presses a finger to Easton's mouth.

"Stop. You've been working on this with Pascale, haven't you?"

Three's first Victor. The way she went off, people guessed Pascale might be Three's final Victor. There's a reason they use arena forcefields now, even at enough power expenditure per week to charge Panem for a year. There's a reason natural gas smothered her family before she could ever come home. And there's nothing anyone can use to shut her up now. The cool, relentless words of veiled sedition and the clouded anglerfish eyes...

Easton's never been able to lie to her. Aldera can see the twinge of guilt cross through him.

"You can't _listen _to her. Do you understand me? She's giving you this- this treason, and these conspiracies, and she doesn't have anything to lose. _You do. _And you two wanted to spring this on me right before we go to the Capitol? So we could pick up her game? Maybe try for another Nineteenth?" Aldera harshly wipes her eyes. "Got some civilian centers in mind? The only thing I'm going to do is mentor my tribute. And you'll have your first one. That's what you should be researching."

His brow twists with pain. "So the plan is to do that every year, for the rest of our lives. Scrape together a tiny chance to bring a kid home. Maybe one or two every twenty years. That's all we get."

"Yes. Maybe. Do you think I like any of this? I know it isn't fair. It's not- this isn't the right time to even think about this. Maybe after-" She cups her hand over her mouth. "Maybe after Snow dies, when there's upheaval, and they're tearing each other apart for the position, there'll be enough unrest to make a move. But that won't be for decades. He's too powerful. You think he can't account for any of these records being uncovered? You want to reveal this to the Capitol- a conspiracy theory about a frame job, right? He'll make sure it never gets out. Nobody will hear it or believe it. You know what happens after that?"

She exhales, resting her head against the wall. It's sky-blue. She wanted blue in her home. There's little enough of it over the light pollution in the district and the Capitol, and the pines were too dense to catch more than glimpses. She remembers lying broken on her back under the great branch. A wet, cold numbness radiating from her waist, seeping downward. Something was horribly wrong with her legs. Her feet. And the stifled blood pushing through the Career's clenched teeth, her purple face turned to Aldera. She couldn't look at that. She tipped her head back to find the sky while she died. Just a glint of it.

The trees blew back in a circle above her, and the sunlight turned the grass into silver. The blue of noon was the clearest thing she had ever seen. And the hovercraft dropped a ladder to her, and a claw to pull away the branch that paralyzed her. And Aldera Steel was still alive.

"Snow would kill you, and your grandparents, and your cousins. If I were culpable, in any way at all, he might kill my parents and my sister. But not me." A tiny noise twists in her throat. "In nine years, he could Reap my niece, so I could watch her die knowing that I had it coming the whole time."

"It's like that for all of us," Easton says softly. "It's not just me and Pascale. You don't know how many-"

"Don't tell me. Don't tell me _any _of them." Her jaw tightens. "I'm not going to turn you in if you want to play this. I will not be involved. But they could still question me. Don't make me culpable. Please don't do that to me."

He smooths the hills and valleys of her rumpled coverlet. It's an imperfect job. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay." A corrosive lode of dread is lodged in her stomach. "You should go home, E. Don't talk to me about this anymore. Tomorrow I'll go over the sponsor catalogue with you."

"All right. You should get your sleep."

"I'd better. Dad's waking me up early for pancakes." She cracks an uneven smile. Easton mostly returns it. "Mind the table manners and he might let me invite you over."

"I wouldn't miss it."

Aldera watches him through the window blinds as he leaves. The light flicks off on his porch. The upstairs one flicks on. His silhouette moves around unrestfully in there. It's so small. They call him the tribute who never grew up, who makes rabbits and cats out of wire, and earnestly displays all the hundreds of them that his little fanbase sends him. She knows he really appreciates them. He couldn't lie about it if he tried.

The tribute who will probably never grow up.

A taller silhouette moves past the frame with him, and Aldera watches the conspiracy of Easton and Pascale early into the morning, until the hazy dawn colors of the sky find her shuddering with nightmares on the windowsill.


	8. District Five: Caramel

_Reaping Day._

* * *

Selena swears like a dockworker as the town square falls ringingly silent, and Misty can't blame her. She grips the ribbon around her waist with stiff fingers. _You __idiot, _she wants to shout, _you impulsive child, what do you think you've done? _A friend should've held him back. Whatever was going through his head should have been locked inside. But those two words can't be unsaid now.

Looking blindsided, District Five's first Volunteer in decades steps out of the fifteen year olds' section, the middle area. He walks pigeon-toed. His shoes are too small, even unlaced, but his shirt is well-mended and hangs soft with years of washing. He's got a mother who cares for him. Why would he go and give up a thing like that?

The broad teenager with the blocky fists doesn't waste his reprieve. He takes a few uncertain steps before he bolts from the stairs, barrelling for his section again, bursting into the arms of a wide-hipped, sobbing girl, scooping her right up into the air. Technically, he's got permission to return all the way to his family in the back rows, but the cameras are soaking this up. It is honestly better television than the patched-up dud still shuffling through the dirt.

"That was a contender. What the hell is _this_?" Selena grinds through her teeth. "Is he brain-damaged? If he thinks he's going to enjoy a week of ice cream just to step off the pedestal before it gets hard, I'll break his neck myself. I can't run around for sponsors to indulge a death wish."

"There could be another reason. Maybe there's something up his sleeve," Misty whispers, with the vain hope of a slum kid on Winter's Day. Selena is unimpressed.

"You think so? You feel like switching?"

Misty's girl was Reaped with no fanfare. A sweet-faced, limber teen with dark almond eyes and straight bangs. Maharajah, the escort, called her Ling. Her dress is real silk, and Misty can easily imagine her being from one of the creches, privately-tutored technicians' children who play with video cubes for their birthdays and never take tesserae, because their daddies get sent to engineer the arenas nine months out of every year. It is hard not to hold a grudge against them where Misty comes from. When the bigger boy was climbing up to the stage, she would have said yes. A switch out of jealousy.

But she shakes her head now, and Selena smirks bitterly, confronting the reality of the young boy who has just knocked Five down several pegs for the heck of it.

He says his name is Newel. He has to repeat it for the microphone to pick it up. With prompting, he raises his hand into the air with Ling's. There is only the typical dull rumble of applause. Maharajah hurries them off the stage without much ceremony, and Misty can guess why.

If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.

* * *

"You're a fucking blockhead. No offense." Selena bites the end off a string of red liquorice, and digs into the candy jar for a packet of sugar dust. "Please, lay it on me. You felt really bad for his girl back home? You've got a _thing _for his girl? Maybe stepping up is gonna enlighten her to your nascent charms? Have you got a sick sister? Dad's injured, out of work? Those are classic. I don't know how effective, but they've got appeal." The dust pours neatly down the hollow liquorice tube, and she stops it up with a sour candy nugget. She crosses past Newel on her way to douse the whole thing in the caramel fountain. "Are _you _terminally ill? It's noble, but there's not a sentimental goon in the Capitol who'd drop sponsor money on that. So let me have it. I want to know if I have a chance at getting you home."

"My mom-" he says, and pauses to watch her expanding log of sugar. She twirls it while the caramel dries, and rolls it in one bowl of crushed nuts and one of chocolate shavings. "I didn't...mean to Volunteer. I was thinking 'what if it happened,' and it jumped out of my mouth before I could-"

"I figured that much." Her eyes are hard chips of blue ice, but not unkind. Maybe she knew enough at this age to not unzip her lips until well on the way home from town square; still, the stress of the Reaping is otherworldly, and she remembers her brother retching from nerves before the escort was even on stage. It's her sixth year out now. She's got to roll with the punches. Newel, for instance. Newel is a bit of a kidney-punch. "So you wanted to save your mom? I know some maternal sponsors on my roll. I guess you could play this young, humble hero. Vulnerable, which gives them something to hook you with, and very grateful. I know it's a lot of bull, but they go crazy over this stuff."

"I didn't do it to save my mom." The boy is still matter-of-fact, but a distant, painful sense of purpose drills through his gaze straight into Selena's skull. "I wanted to get away from her. I want to put her in jail for the rest of her life."

He rolls up his soft, mended sleeve, and all of Selena Elian's plans make a violent swerve to the right.

* * *

Ling is polite to a fault. That's what she has going for her so far. Her table manners impress even Maharajah, who has existed in a perpetually blasé opiate haze for longer than Misty can remember going to the Reapings, and while she has been crying, she's apologized repeatedly, muffling the damp noises in her own linen handkerchief. Who gives their daughter a handkerchief for a token? Creche people, apparently. Misty had been right about that. Imagine engineering the power grid for an arena your child ends up Reaped into, while under pain of death or Avoxing for the whole extended family if you slip any pertinent details.

It's hard to feel bad for a girl who's never wanted for anything, but it's getting easier now. Misty strokes her hair while she cries on the end of the bed. Cries, apologizes, wipes her eyes.

"Do you think there's any chance I could join the Career alliance?" she asks, lifting a splotchy red face. Misty tries to think of the most tactical categorical 'no.'

"I managed to do it because I was smaller than any of them, and they needed someone to go quickly through the pipes and find supplies. They let me live at the bloodbath after I killed a boy for his backpack and almost got away. I was good at something they needed." The young woman tilts her head, tinny sheets of earrings clinking together behind her soft hair. "Do you have a feat you're talented in? Remember, the arena is always something new. You could find yourself excelling in a lot of different ways."

"I don't know a lot about nature, or survival, ma'am. I do well in school, but-"

Misty almost laughs. "Please, I don't think we'll need the 'ma'am.' You're making me feel old. You would've been eleven when I won."

It seems to unnerve Ling to be reminded how new Five's mentors are. Well, that's the breaks. Vito Purnell walked out as Five's first Victor in the Twenty-First, and hung on for over three decades, alone. The 50s saw fit to give him two girls in a row. Before Misty could wash the blood and scorched skin from her palms, he was already signing his retirement papers. He'd always wanted to live out his time in some hammock on the coast. Which left Selena, sharp and inflammatory with memories of gnawing rats and canned food swollen with botulism, and Misty, the gentle-voiced district traitor. If they ever agreed on anything, the pundits joke, it must've been on accident.

Ling is waiting on her every phrase like she's got the keys to the castle, the sword in the stone. Misty isn't sure how to tell her that if it took Vito the longest part of his life to save one, Five might be bang out of luck for quite a few years onward.

"Something we might be able to do is play with your father's influence," she considers, and her tribute clings to the words. "He's loyal, proud of his duties. He feels honored that his daughter has the privilege to compete in one of his own pieces of work, and you're honored as well. You're respectful, dazzling, and eager to showcase the brains of our district. You've always been interested in the Games because of him, right? Give me a sound bite: which of the old arenas have you wished you could visit since you were a little girl?"

* * *

It takes another coat of caramel and a topper of fudge before Selena settles down. She is going to be nibbling her confection all the way to the Capitol. Misty sometimes tactfully suggests the salad platter, or a dish of buttered peas, or at least some artichoke hearts. Fuck that, Selena returns. If the only thing between you and toxic paralysis for two and a half weeks is the grass growing through the concrete in stiff tufts, you'd get over all the appeal of vegetable fiber too.

Anyway, if Newel doesn't get home to personally send his mom to the darkest hole under the Justice Building, Selena is going to kill her herself. The boy took visible comfort in that. A breath of relief, like Panem had been lifted off his back. He was ready to listen. If it came to it, ready to die.

Coriolanus _wept._

"We're going to handle this carefully," she says, scraping the caramel prong with her teeth. "We don't play you as the abused boy from the start. It would look weak, and they have to know it's something you can overcome. So I'll be firm with your prep team- we're covering up those arms for the chariot rides."

He nods. He's already replaced those fine mended sleeves over his patchwork of dot burns and finger bruises. "When do we show them?"

"I want to say interview night. That's the biggest punch, with a huge audience, and Flickerman can make it the tragedy of the year. But I don't want it to feel like we pulled it out of our asses. I'm thinking we can allude to it earlier than that. When I'm making the first rounds with the sponsors, I'll give them a hint of this dark secret that drove you to Volunteer. They'll be chomping to know more." She chips the hardened candy between her molars. "This is going to be a trickier part. Somewhere in the tribute building, you need to get someone to grab your arm, or push you. Some kind of provocation. Whatever you do, don't touch first. Once they do it, _deck _them."

Newel's eyebrows are perched in fascination. "Fighting with other tributes isn't allowed before the Games."

"So it's tricky. But what are they really going to do? There are cameras all over the building, and something like this will get leaked to the publications. You make sure it's self-defense. They get to see you know how to take care of yourself, and you don't like people touching you. If it gets big enough, Flickerman might even bring it up first. It'll be the perfect opportunity."

"How do you know I _can _take care of myself?" he asks quietly. "What if I can't even deck them? And if I can't do that part- in the Games there's no way I'll make it through the bloodbath."

"Get up, then."

Selena stows her candy in her mug of chocolate milk and brushes off her hands. Newel rises from the opposite couch with apprehension.

"Think about the way she talks to you. Think about her getting smug when she knows you won't tell on her. Think about cigarette smell. All the times you could've knocked her down before."

She isn't a wordsmith. Misty might've gone on with more encouragement, or couched it in softer things, avoided hurting him. The way his face pinches is enough. If he wins, he'll get his therapy for the rest of his life. But there's that little thing that needs to come first.

"That's me," she says. "That's all of them. They won't be sorry if you die. They won't even care. Hit me. Do it now."

She raises the back of her hand to him, and Newel snaps out and hits her in the face.

* * *

**(More than halfway through the introductions. I would very much appreciate your feedback!) **


	9. District Two: Mesh

_A month before Reaping Day._

* * *

A sour mug of coffee cools by Kieran's elbow as he turns through pages. The laminated fluttering is hard to tolerate. There's a reason the Foundation's records can't be stored on a tablet- can't risk compromise, slipping every detail of this officially-forbidden operation to the first opportunistic dataminer- but the least they could do is invest in some cardstock.

The noise isn't really the problem. Kieran is...not satisfied. Out of his seven Volunteer candidates, nobody is lighting a spark. The girls are eighteen, lethal and beautiful as avalanches, staring out of their files with the unspoken challenge. _Choose me._

The _problem _is-

District Two hasn't had a Victor since Augur in the Fifty-Second. That means something. Years of unprepared outliers, a One, and two Fours, while the Foundation's finest eat the dirt. Is Two out of favor? The outer districts sneer at the bad luck. What reason is there to mourn when Two is tasting defeat? Welcome to the club.

But they're outer districts, and any win they can scrape up is already from luck. This is eight years of Volunteers wasted: sixteen children trained their entire lives just to die on accident.

They haven't been good enough. He hasn't been good enough.

Kieran rubs the bridge of his nose. Pallas's file lists her top scores in acting and showmanship, a wicked hand with a battleaxe, and a smile that could melt concrete. Jericho is huge, with a deadlift record and three flawless unarmed kill tests. Erin is laconic and patriotic, Patina is harrowingly unhinged. Kieran's mentored five and saved none- he _knows_ all these stories.

He shakes his head, belatedly checks on his coffee, and rises to dump it down the drain. He's pored over these files for hours into the night. The pale crescents are puffy under his eyes. He's far past the stage when his mentor was constantly at hand to ground him, besides the fact that he insisted he didn't need it, but sometimes it would be a safety net to have her close. Antonia's at work in the Capitol this year, and there is nothing between him and freefall.

In Two, mentoring is a choice. Mentoring is a closer responsibility than raising a child. Any reckless highschooler can drink theirself blind and make a mistake that will embitter them for nearly two decades. A mentor chooses a candidate to throw their entire soul into saving from the deadliest month out of a year; if they pull a Victor, they get to pick up the pieces for the rest of their life. He can never repay what he owed to his five Volunteers, but he can't make their sacrifice a waste.

He runs his fingers forcefully through the sheet of his unkempt hair, trying to think. What is he missing?

The Capitol has been enjoying their outliers. There's only one thing in them that a Career can't match. Authenticity. When you've trained for your angle and your interviews and every predicted kind of arena since you were eight, it's hard not to make it look easy. Too perfect. Is it pathos they want? A sense of humbleness?

_Human _Careers.

Kieran pinches his chin, gritty with shadow. He goes for a different file buried under the paperwork. Non-candidates. Seventeen years old.

There's only the glimmer of something else in here. They're still polished and crafted, with the calculated confidence of teenagers who have already killed. Maybe there's less arrogance, but all it comes down to is less experience. The rest of the Pack will be at the top of their game. He turns the pages with receding hope. The best thing to do would be to choose an actual candidate. Refine the angle. Try harder. With a face like Pallas's, authenticity will hardly be...

A girl's face catches him with a focus so bright it sears. The name is Aurelia. Kieran peers closer in some disbelief. She can't be seventeen.

But she is, barely. No mock-arena exam. Only two kill tests. And she's plain. This isn't bloody One, where every Volunteer looks like they came out of a perverted scientist's test tube, but her records will have to be something remarkable if she's made it to this tier. The Capitol wants them good on camera.

The records do match. Under her thin face and imperfect teeth, the stolidity of upturned brown eyes, she's unbeaten even in the tier above her with a shortsword. She has dexterity and composure, but low marks in acting. The Foundation's had trouble sticking her to an angle. She's loyal to them, without a doubt, but her dedication to the Capitol gets fuzzier. He can't risk this. He'd be throwing her to the sharks with weights on her legs and expecting her to swim. He would do better with Pallas. She's good enough to_ act _genuine.

He closes up the file. He stares fruitlessly at Pallas and her dangerous, breathtaking smile. She knows she's supposed to be the choice this year. They both know it. He opens the younger file again.

_Aurelia. _She's not tiny, and there's no baby fat in her cheeks, but they're not sculpted. Her solemn, youthful concentration sticks into him. No vicious or alluring angle for her, but One nearly always provides that. She won't play easy and loose like a Four. Jupiter always picks his boys loyal and quarry-carved. Could there be a niche for this?

If it fails, it'll fail drastically. He won't be mentoring again for years. The little girl who thought she could hack it in the big leagues will be murdered with the indignity of an outlier, bringing shame back on the Foundation.

If she wins, Two still can't ever play this again. It's practically treachery to the Pack. If she's human, what does that make them? The Careers are monsters that distract the districts from the source behind the Games. In the Forty-Fourth, Kieran shattered the back of the Seven girl's head with a crossbow bolt, and that principle kept him ice-impassive before her district's burning hate.

Aurelia dies earlier than any Two should place. Or she lives, and Kieran's next candidate is doomed on principle. He can't throw off Snow's formula without the consequences. And which of those consequences come down on her too?

"Shit," he whispers. His thumb brushes over her printed forehead in some sort of apology. Whatever this girl entered the Foundation for, whatever she thought she would make of her life, she will not be expecting this year to be hers.

He's going to have a hell of a time convincing the committee of this one.

* * *

Jupiter Grantforth is wearing a timber wolf's mask, an enveloping trenchcoat, and four pounds of concealed weaponry, but he is not having a good time. He hopes to Snow that the encroaching puddle in front of his feet is not what it looks like. A gaggle of women wearing nothing more substantial than glitter have already offered him various drugs if he'd come and dance with them. _You're younger than my daughter, _he said, firmly pressed into the back of the velvet lounge seat. The strobes pulsed violet, magenta, indigo. When the ringleader giggled and swayed, he could see the dilation of her pupils behind her mouse mask's gray mesh. _I could be your daughter tonight._

The sooner he can get on with this appointment, the better. Of course it couldn't be in the lobby of a hotel or a private residence. He's got to be kept waiting at the bottom of Cicero. He has been here long enough to reluctantly order a basket of quail wings and a miniature pumpkin stewed with chestnuts. If they think he's going to risk anything from the bar, they'll be waiting till a blizzard hits Ten. The chaise creaks under him as he scans for the host. How is anyone supposed to keep track with all these masks? The incessant light and noise are supposed to disorient him, he can tell that much. But he's no fresh Victor running on painkillers and too much adrenaline. He's the Twenty-Ninth. He's a Two. He _weathers._

He's earned the right to weather in a private office, is all. Maybe one with some air conditioning. The humidity in here makes his beard itch.

"Mr. Grantforth?"

The voice comes from behind him. Maybe he's supposed to be awed that they recognized him so easily, but he's not fooled. The coat can only do so much to conceal his muscle mass. He turns to them. A slight figure in a green hummingbird mask and cloaking robes is perched by the armrest. Jupiter nods gruffly.

"We heading someplace private?"

The person cocks their head for him to follow up the steep, spiraling stairs. If he'd taken any sort of drug, he'd be fighting for his balance. He plods without a falter. His host ascends rapidly. Three floors up. Five floors. Six floors. The air coming through the door on his right is shockingly hot, and something is squealing like a pig, chased by laughter that echoes in the stairwell. The lighting is brighter up here. Nine floors. The light on the tenth floor is all red, and there's no noise. The eleventh floor smells like copper. The thirteenth smells overpoweringly of cleaning fluid. His host stands back as a fox-masked man comes through the door with a full bag over his shoulder and passes without a word. Jupiter can't see anything in the room but wet floors before the door swings shut.

"Mr. Grantforth," the hummingbird prompts him.

"I'm still coming." He rubs the cramp in his thigh and keeps moving up.

One of the doors is pressurized shut, with something pink and powdery concealing the windowplate. He can hear songbirds behind another door, and there is an enrapturing, floral-loamy scent, as though it holds a forest clearing. Traces of soil are scuffed on the step. Behind the next door is a slight ringing sound that makes him double over with dizziness. He catches himself on the railing, shuts his eyes, and drags himself higher until the floor doesn't feel like the ceiling anymore. Behind the next door a girl is screaming, ragged with hysteria, and calm voices are speaking over her. There are more and more doors. Jupiter breathes through his mouth, buries himself in the purpose of his appointment and the clean smell of the mountains, and he keeps climbing.

His host stops outside an unremarkable door. There are still floors above this, lit so brightly he has to squint. He can't make out the number of them. The hummingbird swipes their card and allows him into the room.

It's a sleek, modern office with several screens, comfortable chairs, and a bartop. Finally air-conditioned- the contrast of the cold is like a slap. Windows overlook the Capitol below them. Jupiter hadn't realized they were this high up. All the buildings are so bright. It's the city that never sleeps, and the miniature squiggling dots of so many automobiles do it justice.

"Have you ever seen it from this vantage before, Mr. Grantforth?" the host inquires. They pour a glass of bright emerald absinthe and take a seat in an office chair. Their feet barely reach the floor. The voice comes through a modulator, refined to a calming neutral tone. Nobody knows who the host of Cicero _is. _If anyone does, it hasn't leaked, and rewards are offered by the most prestigious networks in terms of millions. "I consider it an invaluable perspective."

"Never seen it like this before, no. Not high up very often. Hovercraft for my Games was shielded." Jupiter lowers into the seat before them with a twinge in his back. It's an odd thing for a Career, the spectre of age. Any time past eighteen is a blessed gift. You don't really expect you'll _have _to start thinking about arthritis. He mentally adds on to his exercise regimen back at the Village. Imagine a Two taken out by a staircase. "I understand you have business in mind, Cicero?"

"Do you see that bright building with the transparent floors to our southeast?"

He squints one eye. "Yeah. The Governor of Tesserae lives there."

"She's holding a party for Adrian Waller now. I hear the theme is aquatic. Kaito Ebihara has also made an appearance." They're _smelling _the absinthe, swirling it beneath their long beak. Of course there's no means to drink it without revealing their mouth. There are companies and persons of interest who would sponsor Jupiter for the entirety of the Games if he came to them with hard evidence.

"Our business concerns them, as well as others," the hummingbird says pleasantly. "I would like for you to make contact with the mentors from District Four, and the mentors Killian Corke from Six, Amber Lindell from Seven, and Corazon Ceylon from Twelve. You will inform them that an act of drastic significance is fomenting among rebel extremists, who intend to effect it during the month of the Games. You must ensure that they receive these invitations."

They splay a set of cream-colored cardstock tickets between their gloved fingers. The directions are each labeled with a different name and time. As though playing a role for a magic trick, Jupiter draws them and folds them into his wallet.

"Do these instructions surprise you?" They tilt their head, too, like a bird.

"They don't. I know there are mentors who make private meetings with each other where they can't be surveilled- outer districts, middle districts. Some of them talk nearly seditious under our noses. There's been pings traced into sealed data about the Nineteenth. You wouldn't know which set of mentors was coming into the Capitol if the President hadn't set it up for a reason."

They laugh and clap twice, softly muffled. The motion is uncannily stilted. "Mentors proven loyal and aware will be welcomed to conference in due time. The reward for your continued service will be momentous for your chosen tribute as well as yourself."

"We're not trusting all these ones on the tickets, are we? I could say we're safer with Four, but I wouldn't vouch for the Six."

"We are not to trust them. There are most certainly plants in our circle. What would you advise as the course of action?"

He knocks the desk with his fist. "Flush them out."

"A marvelous plan, Mr. Grantforth," the host says merrily. Now they are completely still. The glass is suspended in their hand without a twitch. "It has been my pleasure to conduct business with you on behalf of our nation. As always, I will be available at a call."

They shake hands over the desk. Jupiter finds himself searching the mesh that conceals their eyes. Imagine if he pulled away the mask. It would be the work of a moment. Can they sense his curiosity? Something glitters behind the hummingbird eyes before they release.

"Mr. Grantforth?" they say once more as he reaches for the doorhandle. "If you wish, you may use the elevator located to my northeast."

He presses his tongue between his teeth until he feels a pop of pain. "Much appreciated, Cicero."

He can see nothing behind the mask, and their head never turns, but he knows they are watching him leave.

* * *

**(Bit of a plot-focused chapter- I hope it holds up! Thank you so much to my readers, reviewers, and submitters. Your interest and feedback mean a great deal to me.)**

**((If you can tell me what the layout/description of the Cicero building is a classical literary reference to, I will be delighted! c; ))**


	10. District Seven: Crater

_Reaping Day._

* * *

Birdsong filters through the high trees that conceal the sky. The morning is misty and heavy on the lungs, and little light reaches the forest floor. What there is comes in blue-grays and sugary purple-oranges, splitting through the leaves to trace veined patterns from the sun.

Under the canopy, Amber's knees are buried in thick, springy moss of a green so deep it's bluish. Her fingers curl into it gently. She kneads it while she pays remembrance to the brightest spots of color in the mist.

There's a funny myth about District Seven and their funeral practices.

Simply put, much of the Capitol is under the impression that a Seven family will burn their loved one to ashes on a pyre of lumber. That would be an outrageous use of so much lumber. If Peacekeepers got the wind of it, the family might by all means find themselves preparing for a follow-up funeral. A nastier addendum to the myth is that Sevens will burn the body to a certain point, and eat it. Waste not, want not. Of course, this is not factual at all. Amber would have had to char and eat her four tributes. She's sown them with flowers instead.

You choose your own flowers in Seven. Tributes tell their mentors what to use in case the worst thing happens. Aged parents tell their families, and pray that their children will lead long, long lives before they have to decide. Flip through the old, reverently unstained pages of pictures, even if anyone in the district could name you off any natural thing from the forest. They like to use the book anyway. It's a Seven tradition. When babies die before their speaking age, they're given daisies. Sometimes when there's a sickness around, the fields bloom with daisies as far as the crest of the copse.

Amber was fifteen when she quietly asked her mentor for white heather. The seeds he bought are still in his cooler. That's the other thing — a Victor buries their own mentor. She has a duty to cover Harmon in snapdragons when his liver finally turns over. But her four tributes are all patches under the moss, and she picked up the bottle quicker than the old man did.

"Silas," she whispers, running her hand through the thickly-tangled blue violets, as though he might feel it in his hair. Her first tribute. She'd sat up with him for the final night, cradling his head in her lap, like she wasn't all of two years his senior and nearly catatonic with fear. He never had time to grow, but he's growing now. "It's going to be okay."

Linnea, with spurs of foxglove. She fought so hard. She and her partner died unbowed to Kaito Ebihara, who dared to play the golden, honorable boy of that hellscape, as if he were _better _than her. Defensive wounds maimed her face and rendered her hands useless before he struck for her throat. When the golden boy came for his Victory Tour, he called her _noble_. Amber could have ripped off his remaining arm. He never had the right to speak her name. He never knew that her favorite treat was apples and she'd taught her dog to do twenty different tricks; Amber can't forget.

With tired, fatal humor, Oskar asked for bloodroot, and she planted it, sticky orange-red, a haunting mirror to his gut wound and reaching wet fingers. She'll never know what he would've chosen if he had the luxury of a longer life. She knows he wanted a family. He had the girl picked out already, and a ten-year contract in the logging crews, and a jar of coins to save for a ring. All for nothing. He knew as well as Amber that the Pack would target a lumberjack with a story to come home for, but he couldn't have foreseen them dragging it out for three hours while she muted the feed and sobbed.

"Piper." Her voice cracks. It wasn't fair, it was never going to be fair. They had loved her sweetness on interview night, as much as they loved the artistic spray of her blood in night vision when scrawny Easton Watts cracked her head open with a rock. Amber smooths the blanket of her cardinal flowers to tuck her into bed. She's taken a few years off after Piper. No, it's not decent to the others, who've all borne more years of this. She has no justification. All she has is Piper's calm face, Piper who apologized to _Amber _for not being enough, who had accepted that she couldn't be saved. And how do you live with that failure buried in your chest like a barbed arrowhead?

There will be another this year. She's been gone long enough. Amber doesn't have her co-mentor's ruthless pragmatism or her under-the-table research contracts, but she's always had the better end of the sponsorships. She'll work the angles, and she'll take Decius Fring's appointments, and she'll do anything she has to, and she won't break her heart this time, because _maybe. _Maybe four children have been enough to pay. Maybe the garden will not grow.

She'll collect the seeds, all the same. It's the Seven tradition.

* * *

Kazimir's back is stuck to her seat with sweat. While the mayor waxes on the history of Panem and the Dark Days, she sips demurely from the mineral water Luke passed her when he wheeled her up the ramp. In summer, the morning mist burns off quickly, and the dew turns into humidity that screws with her hair, which isn't ideal on live television. She's got a shampoo endorsement in the waiting with her platinum bangs on it.

A brave front they make, the five Sevens. Lisle's three left fingers stiffened around his cane, Luke's dark red keloids stretching past the cuffs of his sleeves, Harmon sleepless and bloodshot and razor-nicked. Kazimir frail and shy like something that could shatter to the touch, and finally Amber hollow-eyed, limping on the imperfect curve of her metallic foot. Their youngest plays to her ritual every Reaping Day, coming back to the Village with a smell like wet moss. Kazimir can't afford to drown on the past. There is only enough time to breathe in the present.

She's referenced the polls and run the stats this year until her eyes blurred. She's been at work for the Gamemakers in the botanical garden, sending designs over the holos, crossbreeding monsters. Oh, she's the fragile, distractible one, and it's easiest if that's all the others remember. She should've been a Three. Outgunned in her year by Volunteers and vibrant personalities, and still the weak one out at home. If the Capitol remembers the seven kills on her credit, they remember four perfect Careers tumbling from the trapped ledges, and they know they could've had it better.

It's not her fault she's too damaged to fuck. It's not her fault she was gangling and awkward and the only thing she could do was cheat. It's not her fault she was smart enough to come home. And if anyone remembers her strategy best, it's the Career trainers. Most years her tributes are slaughtered right out of the gate. There's no need to pretend that's coincidence.

But it _isn't_ her fault. If she let herself believe that, she would be the same as Amber and Harmon chasing their demons with hangovers. She would be Luke who still can't keep straight razors in his house. They expect guilt from her and they call it Seven tradition. They did so much to survive, all of them, and now they don't allow themselves to live.

She swirls the fabric of her skirt into ripples and maelstroms, and scratches the back of her neck as she breathes shallowly, lifting the damp hair for a moment of relief. The heat stifles like skintight latex. She's seriously starting to consider fainting when the escort breaks into a spiel about how proud she is to get transferred here from Twelve, and how grateful she is to her viewers' support for making it possible, and how Seven is _almost _as prestigious as an inner district. Just smell those fresh pine leaves in the air!

"Pine leaves. I'm going to throw myself off the train if she asks how we grow the ornaments on them for Winter's Day," Kazimir says from the side of her mouth. "Twelve must be devastated to let go of this one."

Luke's cheek twitches, but he doesn't look down. This is what she has to deal with in the Village. Amber is only watching the crowd with a hand locked around her wrist, bruising.

Kazimir straightens herself up with the rest of them when it comes to the drawing. Some things are sacred. Surprisingly straightforward when she gets around to it, the escort calls her boy out first. Taliesin. He's seventeen.

He's _handsome. _Seven turns out tanned and muscular most of the time, with some honest competition for Four, even if nothing can touch One on sheer aesthetics. But if Four sends anyone who can beat this, Kazimir will eat pine leaves. Dark brown hair curls to Taliesin's collar, falling over wide green-hazel eyes. The cameras eagerly magnify the strong edge of his nose, the shine on his cupid's bow, and the roughly-shaved stubble. Perfect skin. When he seems to realize he's the focus of every screen in the country — and he can't yet be imagining the nature of that attention — he swallows, and holds himself together. The silence in the square makes him magnetic. It's impossible to look at anything but the boy, his shoulders and long legs. The camera crews pan down for the full view.

Kazimir's mobile starts a long, stuttering buzz in her pocket. The sponsors are shameless. Taliesin has no idea of the promises she will have to make them.

Even after the escort overcomes her elation, nearly tripping over her own feet while she gets to the girls' drawing, cameras linger on the boy, tracing him closely as fingers. His purity is as much a part of the appeal. There's no pride to him, and that's a mark over any One, no matter how they spin their angles. Tall, bright-eyed, and achingly artless. A lump grows in Kazimir's throat. It'll be a long time before she goes short on support for this one, but Taliesin could never be a Victor so safely forgotten.

* * *

Ramona isn't beautiful. Even 'nice-looking' would be an overstatement. She's bullish, with a snarl of rust-colored hair, combating her shock with a curled lip and hands shoved deep in her clean overall pockets. Snub-nosed and flat as a newspaper, and tiny, so tiny that the crews can't find her until the children around her part, leaving her the shattering at the center of a crater. She's thirteen.

Amber's nails dig into her sweaty wrist, tearing. It'll be Piper all over again.

But Ramona doesn't accept it that easily.

She doesn't _move. _Every eye is on her, it's clear enough, and her heels are still rooted. Could a bed of flowers suit her? She's like old-growth oak. Her fists are balled up in her pockets, blown thirty feet tall on screen. She doesn't twitch.

As if awakening from transfixion, four Peacekeepers detach from the sidelines and move to bring the girl forward. She wipes a line of dirt off her cheek with her thumb, barely acknowledging their presence. Until one of them grips her shoulder.

Ramona twists him off her, and a sharp voice rings across the square. "Bitch, don't push me." On currents of gasps and swallowed nervous laughter, she marches herself unceremoniously to the stage.

Something is happening within the crowd. The tension is turning.

Taliesin and Ramona up there, facing each other. Big and gentle, he has to bend down to shake her hand, but she's never cowed. Amber thinks she might slap him away. Instead, a look is passing between them. They don't let go.

"What a showing from District Seven!" The escort grasps for the threads of her big event. "If you could all join me in a round of-"

Taliesin and Ramona lift their hands into the air, white-knuckled. He has to bend at the elbow. He's flushed radiant with the heat and the ecstatic terror and everything is spoken on his face: _what the hell do I have to lose? _And the fierceness in the girl could boil the sea. They don't pump their fists or celebrate. They present something unbroken.

"Shit," Harmon rasps behind her, hardly audible. Amber's eyes are wet.

District Seven is actually cheering. In Piper's year, in every year, it's dry and canned. Disengagement is as much resistance as they can give.

This year, it sounds like a _fuck you. _If you can't terrify our children, what can you do to us?

Kazimir at her other side, gripping her sleeve. The woman is unsettled. "There'll be reprisal for this somewhere. The city won't understand it, but Snow will. They'll already be targets."

"Look at them." Taliesin feeding from Ramona's arrogance to keep himself standing. Ramona made beautiful by his innocence. "They know that_. _They're doing it anyway."

Stranger seeds than funeral gardens are growing in Seven this year.

* * *

**(I admit now that this is one of my weaker, more disjointed chapters, and perhaps I can blame that dread wraith, the Semester. I hope it is still acceptable — I will assuredly be revising it in future****. Feedback would be more appreciated than ever! Thank you so much for your attention. Three intros to go, and a long and bumpy ride is ahead for the cast.)**

**((Chapter _9 _trivia answer: Dante's Circles of Hell. The air-conditioned final room is the realm of ice. This truly is the highest point my major will ever earn me c':))**


	11. District Eleven: Grandchildren

_One week before Reaping Day._

* * *

"What's the count, now?"

Galium laughs, bouncing the month-old on his knee. It burbles, drools into its hand, and solemnly analyzes the effect. "This one'll be Maybel's third. I do believe that makes twelve."

"Goddamn, is it just! I lost count by number eight. Wasn't that Sera's first?"

"Sedge's fourth. Your brain's corn mash, old man."

"You can't unlace your pants in the morning no more. You got a flap for your ass, half the time you walk around it ain't buttoned. Talking to me about brains." Wesley reaches over and wipes the infant's slimy chin with his sleeve. "Good head of hair on her. She looks to be healthy."

"She sure is. Bit of fat to her too. Maybel's thinking to call her Corie."

Wesley pauses, eyes sliding sideways, stern over his spectacles. He slows the rocking chair with his heel. "Best think to it again."

"It's not made official yet," Galium corrects quickly. "She's no fool."

"I know she ain't, but anyone can forget."

Anyone can. Wesley knows the example is primed in both their heads, on the unspoken edge. Sedge forgot.

Sedge, Galium's first. Sedge had four kids who counted. One who didn't. You get too hopeful, you name your baby before its first five months, and you're asking for bad fortune. You're only tempting attention to it. Wesley warned them, but there wasn't a thing he could do when the pneumonia came. Good medicine never ships all the way to Eleven. He paid for their unmarked box, and he told them, next time, mind yourselves. Don't expect living out of the Village gives you any more leave to be rash.

Sedge's family minded themselves. The Games took their second girl, but no other. They'd paid the price. They've been safe since then.

You have to mind what you do, what you say, what you think, or you've got it coming.

More cautious now, Galium ruffles his granddaughter's tight curls, warm in the sun. When she hiccups and squirms, he leans her against his shoulder, thumping her back with three coarse fingers, until she spits up all over his shirt. Galium groans, putting a hand to his stomach. "Ooohh. I might be in the same boat."

Wesley chuckles. "Better out than-"

Galium spits up blood. Wesley scrambles to get out of his chair. It's rocking, beating back and forth on the porch, and he can't get any purchase, not on thin old legs, like a frantic overturned beetle, and how absurd it is to become a weak old man after wielding such a history.

"Hold on. Galium! I'm here. I got you. Come on, little man, don't do this to me. It ain't your time. I got you-"

All the sunlight is guttering out. And the baby isn't here, but Galium, his tribute, is eighteen again at the same time as he's nearly seventy, and his face is scared and wet. This isn't what happened. Wesley took him home. He _saved _him.

"Galium," he croaks, reaching through a cataracted blur, and all he pulls back is a pillow.

Wesley shuts his eyes. He's twisted himself up in the sheets, which is better, at least, than tumbling out of the bed. A cold spot of drool glues his cheek down. What time is it? Wax must have drowned the candle some hours ago. There's too much brightness sheeting through the curtains. Far past dawn. A long life ago, he would've been active by five to wash up before work. But there's no work to give him now, not carpentry, nor cooking, nor gardening. If he hunches he can't be sure he'll get up. He can't mind a quick-legged toddler.

He fought to save Galium from twenty-three tributes and a metal wasteland tossed with storms, but last year, he couldn't fight time. The diagnosis was COPD. What a funny thing to make him helpless in his own Village. If Galium were in the arena, he could have sent him a medical kit in a moment. Outside of the Games, he's an irrelevant old man, and he's tired. His dreams are bad of late. It's always a sign. You have to mind that, too, or you won't see what's coming.

Wesley unknots himself and pushes his feet into slippers, wiggling his toes until feeling stirs into them. He's in his long nightshirt, and it'll be good enough. He needs...another thing. Round spectacles, dragged off the end table. His hair and stubble are a peppery fuzz. He'd only make it worse if he tried to shave. Nobody's going to care anyway.

He should check on Erika. Everything's been bitter since Galium went. He's closed himself in the house, shiftlessly tested days without eating, until she was forced to intervene. He sleeps instead of comforting Galium's family, adjusting them to their eviction from the Village, and too much of that's fallen on her. It's not what she deserves. She's his girl, too. The world didn't end with his little man.

_Get up, _he urges himself, hunched on the edge of the bed. _You weak bastard. Corn mash for a brain._

Everything is heavy, and he's cold. Sometimes he doesn't know where he is. God give him that release.

_Get up. It's not over._

Galium minded his actions, his words, his thoughts. He did everything right. He didn't have it coming. It didn't _matter. _If Eleven didn't feed on hope and story and snatches of pre-war homily, it would only go hungrier, and a person can't survive that. Tesserae meal doesn't feed the soul.

But believing didn't save Galium.

Misery has been keeping Wesley cold, sluggish, sunken, like a boot driving him into the mud. Trying not to feel so it won't hurt. Anger, though. It's been a very long time since he allowed himself to drink from that. Anger could give him a purpose.

He lets himself think of Pascale's dismissiveness, her perfunctory contact, only because he was one of the original set, and her absent irritation when he turned down the deal. The unbothered examination from Lorne and his protégé, last time they were all in the Capitol, like he was some obsolete specimen under a lens. _Irrelevance. _He lived through the Rebellion before any of them were born - before the _Dark Days._

A heat in his skin makes him stand up, a noise popping in his hip. Drives him to the mirror. Well, the scruff could go, couldn't it? He looks like hell. It's not as though he was expecting to travel to the Capitol. Erika, the gentle one, unaware, and alone for another year. Stuck in the middle of two different sides that could use her up and leave her for dead. She's come close enough already.

Wesley's grieved for long enough. He couldn't have saved Galium with all the anger in the world, but he's not going to make it so easy as that if anybody wants to take away his girl.

* * *

Erika wakes up to the distinctly pungent smoke of breakfast burning. She spares a fond smile for it, but wastes no time in tying off her flowered robe and hoofing it downstairs.

"Cover it up. Just flap it out with the dishtowel, it don't need water."

"It'll set on fire!"

"No, it's small, it'll be fine. It's just a little smoke. Julius, help your brother with that — my oats are boiling over. If you're quick enough, we'll have time to redo the whole- er."

Michael freezes in place over the foaming pot of oats. Haven's dishtowel dangles a small corner into the skillet. Like a game of red light, Julius makes it halfway through elbowing him deep in the ribs before he sees his mother. She blinks twice, taking it in.

"Morning," Julius calls cheerfully over the spitting, smoking, semi-edible clump. Haven looks like he might make a run for it.

"You know you just gotta use the lid," Erika checks.

Julius slams it down over the skillet and extinguishes it. Erika moves around the stove and turns the heat on the oats to the lowest setting, bringing the crest of bubbles down below the edge of the pot.

"You got anything in the oven?"

"We already roasted some potatoes." Michael gestures to a pile of thoroughly roasted russets by the sink. "Remembered the oil after a minute."

"Salt too?"

"Remembered _that_ in the first place."

"Wonderful." She kisses him on the cheek, wrapping an arm around his hips, and he smoothly rejoins, tucking her head under his chin. "Should I ask what had the nerve to sear itself to the bottom of my good cast iron skillet?"

"It was eggs," Julius inputs. "We had to do them fast before you woke up-"

"So Julius turned it all the way to-'

"Haven wouldn't let me use the hot sauce to put it out-"

"-'speed scrambling' and he was splashing them everywhere-"

"It was their idea. Crept in and woke me up half past four so we could take care of the garden first." Michael grins, bleary-eyed. "Been a while for me. We wanted to do something before you left this year. I'm sorry I wasn't on the ball as it came to the kitchen."

"Honey, you didn't grow up with a kitchen." She presses her nose into his neck, nuzzling until he leans down to kiss her again. The twins pointedly look away. Julius flicks a scrap of egg out of the pan and down the drain.

Sometimes Erika knows everything was worth it. There is a long, pursed scar drawn from her wrist to the joint of her elbow, silver in her earth-toned skin, because it's the hardest thing she ever came to accept. But she found people to get her there.

Michael never tasted anything richer than tesserae grain when he was a child; Julius and Haven will never have to know what it was like. Two children died to her, and she brought two to life. It's about making things even. Making things better. She does what she can.

This is worth it.

"I was thinking to take dinner to Galium's family tonight," she says, over salted potatoes and foamy cinnamon oatmeal with blueberries. It isn't so bad after all, though nobody tried salvaging the eggs. "At least once more before I leave this year. God knows they could use some support."

"Shopping trip, then?" says Michael, with an eagerness that would astonish nearly any woman from the Capitol. She's learned that their husbands groan over it, make excuses, resist the chore. She's sat through some of the complaints with as much sympathy as she could. You never push back on a potential sponsor. She doesn't mention that Michael had never been able to shop before. His hand-me-downs were handed down through four generations. He hadn't owned more than fifty cents in pocket money all his life.

"A real undertaking," she promises. "There's a battalion of them, and there ought to be enough left for something at breakfast. Plenty of daylight for us to make the trip. Boys, why don't you put that kettle to work on some industrial amounts of tea? As soon as we finish up here, I'll-"

The doorbell jingles. With good-natured irritation, Erika pats down her robe and goes to answer. Have they got a package in waiting? She doesn't remember one, but the stylists might have sent her something for the Reaping. Honestly, she's been reusing the same sundress for fourteen years. Even if she is going to be the sole mentor again, nobody pays Eleven much mind. She supposes a letter of thanks to the stylist team would still be in order.

It's not a package on her doorstep. It takes a moment to recognize _Wesley. _He looks...coherent. Steeled. Alert. Ever since Galium- he hasn't been this keen in a year.

"Wesley," she begins, the name startled out of her, and finds that she doesn't know where to continue. The warmth of her family meal is fading, leaving an unexpected curl in her stomach. Her mentor's smile is small and sad and grim, and his hat is in his hands.

"Can't let them get you too up there," he says. "Can't have it done. Ain't going to risk it again."

"What does that mean? Wesley, are you coming to the Capitol? For your health, you know you can't- after the stress you've been under, you're risking-"

"Don't mind what I'm risking." Sadder, and grimmer, but it's solid. He hasn't smiled in such a long time. He moves before she does, bony arms stiffly crooking out. There are so many things she doesn't understand about this. He's _retired. _What is the risk he's talking about? And resentment, too, that he up and locked himself away when Galium's family needed him and _she _needed him. The things he made her shoulder. But she can't make herself step away.

The frail old man comes up to her chin when he hugs her. He rocks her side to side in her doorway, soundless and tender, like she's only a kid again, trying to believe his promises that he can get her home.

* * *

**(Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I am going to be a little snaky and blame my college theatre production crew (endless time in purgatory backstage, phoneless, and still under a condition of acute sleep deprivation) for the wait, but really, it ought to be up to me to stay consistent. I cannot guarantee a rapid updating schedule, but at least I'm done with crew assignment for the semester. Huzzah! Thank you so much for your patience and attention.)**


	12. District Twelve: Steam

_Reaping Day._

* * *

In a family of twelve, number and district both, the Reaping is only a waiting game. With the amount of tesserae she was taking out, Aster had been vaguely surprised to make it even past her first year. Not much further than that. The Thirty-Eighth saw a thirteen year old from deep in the Seam stumble dry-mouthed and clammy to the stage. Before she was on the train they'd already given her flat fifty-to-one odds, and the announcers called her Astrid twice. For comfort, her mother told her to keep a brave face and try to die silent.

She still sends her family a sufficient stipend. She doesn't owe them more than that. In her Victor's home, two stories higher than anything out of the slums, she chooses to share with one housemate.

"Murphy." The pale woman bends over the bed, tucking back her daughter's thick brown hair. She always looked more like Aster than she did Conrad, and that's well enough. Every girl in school said a merchant man would always leave for better prospects, though she'd assumed a Victor's stipend would take care of it. Foolish to think it would keep him in bed with her night terrors and the knife sheathed under her pillow. "Up now, Murph. I'm running your bath. Gonna fix us some coffee when you're done, how's that sound?"

The girl yawns wide enough to crack her jaw. "You never give me coffee."

"Well, today's a big day. _If _you get going and hop into your dress before half past, coffee. Otherwise, zilch."

"Okay. Can we eat at Corazon's place? I want to get spicy chips."

Aster kisses her forehead. "That's gonna take some real hurrying, little girl."

The sound of bare feet patters all the way down the hall, skids on the bath rug, and concludes in a thunk and an eruption of water. Aster winces and smiles. It's hard to stave off the fear about Murphy and Reaping Day, but there are three years left until she's eligible. She's safe for that long. And there's no way in hell that Aster would chance her going in blind. They prep in unsuspicious little ways: expeditions to the meadow, scavenger hunts for safe food, sports and gymnastics at school. They started to rewatch the Games together when Murphy was seven. _That girl ran too close to the Cornucopia. She should've gotten away with the little backpack instead, _she coached, countering her own queasiness with iron focus. _This one is making a fire for the night. You shouldn't risk that when it's late. She thinks she can escape, but she'll never run as fast as the Career pack._

She doesn't give commentary on the Twelve tributes, and Murphy knows enough not to ask. Those ones are coached as well as she and Corazon can manage, sprinkled with small tactical gifts if they make it through the first day, but they always die. Aster's suffered enough to watch them the first time. It isn't worth it to pick them over for their mistakes; it feels like shifting bones she has already buried. Murphy cannot be another of those. The odds for Victors' children are perilous.

She doesn't show Murphy her own Games, either. They'll have to play it in school, and she's not about to keep her home instead, but that isn't something she should hold in her head while Aster's tucking her in at night. She doesn't want to touch her cheek and see her flinch.

This is Aster's twenty-fifth year out, and the wind still ghosts the same through the arc of houses in the Village, all but two of them hollow. And Corazon spends most of her time down at her restaurant anyway. A neighborhood without any neighbors. It's peaceful. In a horrible way, Aster likes the solitude. Sometimes she imagines she is living inside a snowglobe. Shake it once a year, send her to the Capitol, and then she can come home.

She's already set for the Reaping in old slacks, a white button-down, and Conrad's oversized boots, with the laces triple-knotted. The new tributes will be better-dressed than she is. But it's Twelve, and nobody will care. The morning sheds a gray, amorphous light that washes everyone out to forgettable anyway. She brews coffee while she listens to the rampant sloshing a floor above her.

_Murphy doesn't know how to swim_, she thinks, and jumps when she scalds her hand on the side of the kettle. The steam is rising busily. She runs her hand under cold water and hesitantly pats it dry. It's red, but not too swollen. By the time Murphy is down in her yellow dress and kneesocks, coffee and cream are waiting in canteens at the table.

"I thought we'd work on these suckers while we walk. Wanna feed the dogs real quick?"

Murphy enjoys dumping scraps into the bowls by the back door. The cats can generally hunt for themselves, but for Reaping Day, Aster has left them whole fish.

"When I get home this year, I'm going to see if I can get us a pool, and I'll teach you to do laps," she says on their way out.

Crunching through the gravel, with wet strips of hair batting at her ears, Murphy nods agreeably. She's taken to her treat like a squirrel to nuts. "I could do that pretty well. Mr. Duringham says I'm the most flexible kid in my grade, girls _and _boys. And I can beat most of them at the climbing rope, so my strength's keeping up too."

Childhood in terms of statistics, running counts, dodgeball rounds treated with deadly seriousness, analyzing the Games at night instead of spending time with friends. Adults praise her maturity level. They've got no real idea. It's not much of a way to grow up, and it can't seriously put her on a level with the upper districts. But Aster's not planning to let the best thing that ever happened to her die on the end of some goddamned harpoon.

Three years. Then six years. Then they can't hurt her. She's always kept her head down. She's _good._

For now, Aster abides.

* * *

The prices are the most affordable in the district, and she'll often as not serve mining families on credit, to be paid if they ever come up with spare coins in the wallet. Often as not, they won't. It doesn't hurt Corazon to smudge their names off the tab. It's easy to believe she's too much a coward to come and collect.

Corazon isn't stupid, though. When she adopted, one by one, Willa and Gregor and Davies were seventeen. She wasn't going to live with their throats bared. They came from the same orphanage that raised her. People can say a lot of things about Corazon — sullen, superstitious, backhanded — but nobody can say she forgets her roots.

For the Quarter Quell, nobody else forgot hers either.

"You look handsome." Seated at the bright cedar countertop, Aster startles and turns. Corazon scrapes coal dust onto the doormat. "I remember somebody kicking those boots up on my table like butter wouldn't melt in 'em."

Aster smirks and flushes faintly. "Conrad never learned a lot of manners, for a man from town."

"He knew exactly what he was about. When miners came in for lunch break, I could see him drawing himself up real high. 'Look at all these guttersnipes.'"

"It wasn't _that _bad."

"'Look at these smudgy, slap-faced bastards. I think I'll get water and plain rice every time I come in here, just to be sure nobody tampered with it. Also, I think I'll try to stick my last name on my wife, who is a public figure and a Victor. I am just that important.' Did any of my guttersnipes take your order yet?"

"Yes, Gregor's got it. And Murphy is running around here...somewhere...with spicy chips." A faint look of alarm is cast around the quiet wood-paneled facility. Patrons are stationed here and there, taking what good they can from a morning off, but there's no wiry kid to be seen. "I told her not to go upstairs and spill over your things."

"A little curry's not going to do anything to my carpet that hasn't been did already." The older woman slides around the edge of the counter, pops down a tin pot, and perfunctorily starts on a fresh round of spiced tea. Cheek in hand, Aster watches her mentor with a distracted cast to her eyes.

"Don't go off the bend and drink this year."

Aster twitches back, betrayed. "I haven't-"

"Since the Fifty-Ninth? That could be so. I think it's so, or you've been keeping it from me very well. But it's not going to be that easy to keep it from your daughter. She doesn't need to see you come home and wax off again. Three days on the couch. She had to pound on my door and get me over there to drag you into a bath when you sicked yourself." Corazon's preparation never halts. She mixes dried leaves and petals and spices into the canister, grinding them with the butt of a knife. Leaning into the rhythmic motion. Her long grayed hair is pulled into a plain chignon that leaves a couple of curls loose to sway by her face. Willa helped her put it up. "Don't do that to her again. Or to my poor back."

Aster is checking on the other patrons, side to side, but Corazon's been quiet, and District Twelve, whatever you can say about it, has got a sense of discretion. Small spots of color burn in Aster's face. "I'm _clean."_

"Good. I'm trusting I won't need to press you about it." A stream of water raises fragrance from the spices. She rests a hand on Aster's shoulder. There's reluctance, but she allows it. "The tributes are going to die anyway-"

"Cora..."

"-no matter how guilty you do or don't get. And they're going to live on in something." Aster doesn't meet her eyes. The tightness in her brows is all the argument they've had before this, and there's no point raising it again. "The coil doesn't break. Understand? It twists, and frays, but it _does not _break. There is no end to this coil."

"I won't be bothered if they take away Murphy and spray her intestines across my screen, then. She's going to be a _bird_ when she wakes up."

"Never said you aren't to be bothered. Value the time you've got with her. Every year of it. Gregor, I can take that. Thankya, dear." Corazon receives the bowl of flat, floury bread and yellow grain. After a diagnostic sniff, she stirs in a decent glob of hot sauce, and hands it to Aster.

"Don't quit on us," Aster says, tipping her bowl until the meal nearly edges over the top. A soft tide of pearly Nine flour, afforded on Corazon's Victor pension, and never made even by the meagre earnings she can get from Twelve. She does this on her own choice, for the district that spurned the orphan of loyalist watchdogs. They broke rebel cover during the Nineteenth and died for it by a faceless storm of mining picks. Not contented, it took until the Twenty-Fifth for them to send the thin, bleak girl to where they could not have imagined she'd return. "Don't think it's all right to 'twist your coil' and leave us behind."

"And leave Gregor manning my restaurant?" The faux outrage brings out a laugh contained in Aster's dimples. "The prices he'd gouge. Run it right into the ground. Guess neither of us better be heading out early."

Murphy's footsteps pound across the floor above them, shouldering straight through doors as far as Corazon can tell. The smell of breakfast airs through the restaurant, with the steam of chai tea beginning to cut through.

"I gave her coffee for the first time today." Aster looks ready to duck as the footsteps pour toward the staircase. "I'm realizing that might've been preempted-"

"What's the harm?" Corazon trickles brown sugar into her drink. "Everybody used to be a kid."

* * *

**(I hope everyone's healthy and keeping safe out there. Wash your hands, my friends. Somehow we're going to make it through this.)**


	13. District Nine: Green Light (Part One)

_One night before Reaping Day._

* * *

"Sir, you need to sit down while the train is approaching the station."

Long-shift workers sway dully together with the rocking of the bullet train. It's an old, regular heartbeat _th-thump _that most of them have been familiar with for years. Those are the ones able to sleep under their hats. When their station arrives, the men and women will rise in a profoundly quiet, shuffling wave, turned on automatic, like their springs have been wound by miles and miles of _th-thump, th-thump_. Caps settle flat over thinning pates again. The handlers move their crates. The wheels are never properly oriented on their carts, and the noise turns to a disorienting massed drumbeat as they push down the ramps into the cargo holds: _thud-THUD-THUD-thud._

"Sir! For your safety, sit down. We're coming to an abrupt stop."

A few apathetic eyes turn toward the altercation by the left of the unloading door. Most just save their energy. The only sleep they'll get on this thirty-six hour cycle is between districts, and it's a long time before they'll be home...district-bound workers get their day off tomorrow, but even for the Reaping, essential goods don't slow down.

The peacekeeper gets hold of the absent, baggy-eyed man's shoulder and turns it hard. The baton on her hip is matte black in the rattling orange light of the boxcar. "Down. Now."

Lorne Møllesten had not actually heard her instructions before this point, and he shakes himself to it, alarmed by his drifted alertness. "I'm so sorry. I think I was asleep. Lose my own head next, I guess-'

"Just get down." The keen visor of her helmet turns away when she gets the latest notice from her earpiece. "District Six in four hundred metres. In three hundred metres. In two hundred metres."

Lorne has hastily pressed himself into the metal seatback behind him. The lurch of the slowing train knocks everyone forward, a collective shove by the form-fitting inertial hand. The tanned younger man at the end of the line to his right has got his arms looped around the seatback in a cunning way, and he isn't thrown so hard. He spares a chuckle and a bump for Lorne, once the peacekeeper's cleared off to rendezvous in the next car. "New on the line?"

"Oh, yes. Being from Nine. It's been all grain, not trains, right? Haha. I'm Ernie Reznick," he quavers, tucking his head like a tortoise's as the car judders to a halt. A splitting screech, and one more _bump_ before a dead silence that interrupts the easy rhythm the train had provided them. Safe in the smog-drowned tureen of Six shipment land.

"Ernie Reznick. Sork Milhouse," the guy returns, swinging himself to his feet without offering any assistance. He clasps his hands over his head as two peacekeepers enter for the pre-check. Neither of them are the first woman with the baton. Lorne limply follows suit after Sork, linking his pudgy fingers overhead. "Let me put you to a few guesses, and if I'm right by the third one, you gotta buy us all breakfast when we hit break in Twelve."

"Don't take that up with another poor fella. There's not a lot of guesses," mutters the worker to his left, a stout hydrant-shaped woman with tufts of strawlike hair sprouting in every direction.

"You can shut it, Rie," he says amiably, and she jerks around with her lips pushed into a bud. "Now what about it, old man?"

Lorne shrugs, with gentle blue hangdog eyes mostly fixed on the peacekeepers moving through the line from the left side. "Shoot."

"You got transferred on account of...traumatic industrial death in the family." Sork sweeps his tongue across the front of his teeth.

"Ooh. Haha. Sorry, try again."

"No? Too grim. That's okay. Let's do a wide shot. You got transferred on penal contract...because a buddy of yours got caught for being in the seditious way."

Rie makes a warning hiss like a punctured balloon, and Lorne can't resist the eyebrow raise this time at the balls on him. The prosthetic piece that reforms his forehead wrinkles up, itching his hairline.

"Nuh-uh, not at all." He shakes his head decidedly. "My buddies would never get caught with nothing like that."

The peacekeepers are most of the way down the line. Rie will be up in two, and then Lorne. Sork has the presence to hush his voice by a hair. "Yeah, you're a real patriot, Ernie. Don't think I'm out — here's my last go. You have obviously gotten yourself transferred...on account of a debt you couldn't pay off."

The peacekeeper jabs the needle into Rie's thumb and presses her blood print onto his database, waiting for it to process. His foot taps impatiently. _Bump-BUMP-BUMP-bump._

"Their handheld shit never works the first time," Sork whispers, grinning like a cold skull backlit in reddish-orange. He is waiting on Lorne's answer like there is nothing more pressing to do tonight than rag on the buddies for a bit. "Couple weeks ago, they scanned a woman. Read A-OK the first time. Then their database glitched at the end of the line. Had to redo everyone. Flagged her the second time. She was posing as her twin sister. Blood was the same, but the thumbprint was bad. Real patriot like you's got nothing to worry about, Ernie, right? You sweating on your neck right there?"

Rie gets a double beep and a green light. Lorne brings his hands down from his head. He stretches his thumb out as taut as the tendons will go, tightening the pliable prosthetic layer to his skin. The needle goes in deep. He can feel it push against the slick layer that separates the fake from his real thumb, but it holds firm. He presses the small, punctured point hard against the database to well up the tiny blood reservoir.

A stall. The peacekeeper swears and smacks the back of the device. It turns out two beeps. Green. Ernie Reznick, District Nine citizen.

Sork has gone curiously silent while the peacekeeper moves on to him. Lorne smiles peaceably. "It's a powerful bad debt, it is. But I guess I'm putting that first pay on the breakfast. Haha."

"Don't bother that much about it. All the food's shit in Twelve." Sork shakes out his hand and crosses his arms. The workers are moving through the gate in staggered clumps now, under the stark floodlights of the station towers that illuminate every polluted drift in the air. Sour District Six petrol smell rolls in like food poisoning on a bad leg of groosling. It's been exactly the same since Lorne's hushed, perfunctory Victory Tour all that time ago, but for 'Ernie,' he breathes a shocked gasp of it, wrinkling his lumpy red nose.

"I have to say I don't much care for this," he says, marching short-legged through the oil-churned mud like a steadfast bull terrier. Rie smiles a little, though she doesn't turn around. "I hope Three'll be nice, I do. I heard it's circuitry everywhere. Buildings covered in wire! Holo-pictures in the sidewalk that turn colors when you walk on them."

"They only got those sidewalks outside the university. We aren't taking supplies up to there this time. But you'll see 'em on a few shifts, anyhow," Rie consoles. "They're really something at these hours."

Lorne has seen 'em. Pascale took him up to the university when he was a boy, on that Victory Tour that spelled no Victory, after he'd already been rammed through eight districts of fear and bleakness and the brutal, obvious effects of shutdowns — after what he'd seen in _Eleven. _The Nineteenth is not remembered for its Games that year. But Pascale, five years his senior with the palest, oldest eyes he'd ever seen in a person, took him to those tall silver spires to see the circuitry, and the clever computer intelligence that could answer all his questions, and she showed him how to play a holo-game about fighters in space. And she talked to him, while the goggles and helmets were on, because she'd fed a loop through the mouthpiece bugs. She talked to him about so many things, all couched in innocent commentary about the game and its space empire and its dissidents. She wasn't talking about Thirteen yet. But that came in time, with enough innocent conversation. She had to know if he was empire or dissident.

Ernie Reznick was a loyal citizen of Nine. Proud empire man. No living family, no complications. Lorne had been scoping him out for months. He arranged the blood, the thumbprint replicas, the shaped prosthetics. The real Ernie Reznick had to be removed for Lorne to play his part, unfortunately. But it will be for a good purpose. It was a necessity. There was no other possible time, and no other means, for Lorne to drop off the face of Panem. For him to reach Thirteen. He will pay off the powerful debt that he owes to Ernie Reznick there.

For Ernie, anyway, who never saw the colors outside the university, Lorne blows air through his lips and shakes his head with wonder. "I could just imagine that. Why don't you let me pick up that breakfast in Twelve? I bet there's plenty I could hear about what you've seen on this rail, there is."

"Things you're not like to believe," Rie unveils with great gravity. Lorne smiles with Ernie's yellow-capped teeth and follows along with her.

At the end of the Six supply run, in two hours, another set of workers boards for the beginning of their thirty-six. They are in a different car, and Lorne can't catch any of their faces, which wouldn't be much difference anyway. He doesn't know what Gill's own Ernie looks like.

In Three, they do not see the colorful sidewalks around the university, but Pascale boards near the front to tend the engine, rather than passing as a cargo handler. She always had more of an ego. Besides the fact that she's the oldest and brittlest of them.

In Eight, Lorne crashes into a young woman passing through the station, apologizing incessantly while she helps him up and apologizes at a rate to outdo him. When they part, Chenil has the tiny slip of paper concealed on her person. _13 is a go. _The morning hours are bleeding in quite quickly now, and it will not be too long before the Reaping. But she walks casually out of the station, if wincing a little. There are cameras everywhere. Lorne doesn't look back.

In Twelve, Lorne buys breakfast for Rie and a couple of others he's chattered with, although Sork does not join. Lorne buys generously with Ernie's paycheck. He likes being Ernie. It's easy to chatter as this old, silly man, to be doleful, gentle, wistful, naïve. Ernie doesn't know a lot, and he'll trust others to tell him how things are. He doesn't mind when he's the butt of a joke. He's forgiving. He covers for Rie's exhausted water break without asking for anything back. Ernie is nothing like Lorne. When the workers ask him, with the sun of Reaping Day coming up on dust-strewn Twelve, if he will be following the Games, he has a simple answer for them.

"I'll watch 'em, oh yes. I got to watch. They're watching my television set, and they'll know, all right," he asides, with a big comical glance around the area. Probably nobody in this little curry place is about to dash out for the peacekeepers, who equally can't be buggered to do anything about it. Lorne taps on the rim of his mug. "But I don't follow 'em, to cheer about the killings or any kind of thing. I don't see why I should. I think..." Ernie's mocked-up face frowns, representing the clear process of chipping scattered pebbles of thought together to find a spark. Lorne could give them the rebels' speech. He could shout for them to _wake up, get UP, if enough of you fought back, they couldn't stop all of you. _Lorne would feel no guilt in gripping Rie's stolid shoulders until they bruised black, hammering the statistics and the atrocities into her. _You're blind and you're content being blind. Is the Rebellion worth it for people like you? You won't care about any difference if we take Snow down. You'll go on working like this. You don't know how to do anything else. I've done so many things just to make it here, this far, on this day, to get into Thirteen for good. To do the rest of the work to _save you...

Ernie shrugs dolefully, stirring another lump of sugar into his tea. "Just seems like an awful shame is all, I guess. Oh! Thank you, young fella."

One of Corazon's kids brings his Lorne his plate of eggs. He's grateful for the fact that Corazon isn't in the restaurant yet. They were only six years apart. There would have been a chance that she'd look too curiously at him. She's not in on this by any means. Not the loyalists' daughter. Not the girl who hid in that fine merchants' house while her mother and father turned in the Twelve agents who had infiltrated the Capitol. During the very time that Lorne was struggling for his life in his arena, hoping and believing in a rebel miracle.

Lorne doesn't forgive like Ernie would.

He separates from Rie and the group as they slug back toward the train, apologizing, making them promise that they won't leave without him. Haha. He just needs to use the little boy's outhouse. It's this old bladder, doesn't even warn him beforehand anymore...

Even on Reaping Day, the fence isn't charged. Panem bless District Twelve. He hurries out through the meadow, giddy with shift exhaustion, with sleeplessness, with nerves. Suppose a wildcat should come by and eat him in the forest after all of this. The possibility seems remote. Ridiculous. But he travels quietly. He knows Gill and Pascale will be following behind him.

There is a contact out here who will get all of them to Thirteen. Lorne will not see another district again for years. It may be that he will not live to the completion of the final Rebellion. He might never see his Victors in person again. His brilliant Milah and Zachary.

They will have to go it on their own from here. They will have to work very hard and terribly quickly. They'll learn.

He walks for a long time into the forest, an old man in an even older man's skin, but when he sees the silver flag between the leaves, he starts to run, as if all the weights have fallen off his feet.


End file.
